At the Cannes Lions festival in June, marketing chiefs from IBM, Autodesk, Coinbase, State Farm and NBCUniversal shared how AI is reshaping everything from creative production to audience engagement. The executives, recorded for Variety's "Strictly Business" podcast, detailed concrete cost savings, workflow overhauls and a growing skills gap that marketers can't afford to ignore.
AI rewires creative workflows and slashes grunt work
IBM's senior VP of marketing and communications, Jonathan Adashek, said the company's creative teams once spent 80% of their time on derivative assets. "So they're not really getting to be creatives. They're doing grunt work. Yes. And that's not what they're passionate about," Adashek said. After embedding AI into its own workflows, IBM cut that figure to about 40% and it's still dropping. A recent project turning the Sphere in Las Vegas into a giant fishbowl using AI for design and concepting took two days instead of an estimated 15-16 days, and the creatives reported getting more ideas because the tools prompted new thinking.
IBM also found hard savings. "As an organization inside of IBM, we've used AI and automation and corresponding process improvement to take $4.5 billion out of our annual spend in the last three years, and we're going to take another $1 billion out this year," Adashek said. That kind of efficiency shift matters for any marketing department juggling tight budgets and rising content demands.
Coinbase CMO Cat Ferdon echoed the view that AI accelerates output without replacing human judgment. "We believe pretty strongly at Coinbase that AI can help you get to creative outcomes faster, but it's not a replacement for human creativity," Ferdon said. The crypto exchange has been building AI into its marketing workflows for over a year, with an "agentic-forward" approach encouraged by CEO Brian Armstrong. For marketing leaders seeking structured ways to build this capability inside their own teams, an AI Learning Path for CMOs offers a phased framework to integrate AI into strategy and operations.
The AI skills gap widens for job seekers and employers
Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder pointed to data showing 82% of people are comfortable using AI in daily life, yet only a third feel at ease using it in their professional field. Meanwhile, job postings requiring AI skills have more than doubled. "So there's a mismatch between job seekers and the jobs that are available," Treseder said. Autodesk responded with a $350 million commitment to prepare the next generation and current job seekers for roles in design, engineering, manufacturing and media - all disciplines where AI is now a prerequisite.
That disconnect has immediate implications for marketing organizations. Hiring managers will struggle to find talent fluent in AI-assisted creative tools unless companies invest in training. Internal reskilling programs and targeted AI for Marketing Courses & Certifications can close the gap faster than waiting for the labor market to catch up.
Audience connection depends on shared passion, not just scale
State Farm's chief agency sales marketing officer, Kristyn Cooke, explained why the insurer invests in events like NBCUniversal's BravoCon. "It's about connecting around shared interests and relationships and your passion points. And that's what BravoCon brings to us," Cooke said. "The audience is actually the story. They just are, and they're super engaged." State Farm evolved from building branded spaces to creating interactive experiences that leave a lasting impression - a lesson in moving from presence to participation.
NBCUniversal's chairman of advertising partnership, Mark Marshall, previewed the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where NBC will offer close to 8,000 hours of programming across live and curated streams. The strategy, he said, is to let fans build their own experience. "What we've started to learn is that fans love watching the sports, but what they really love is the storytelling of how [the athletes and teams] got to that," Marshall said. NBC is now infusing that storytelling approach across its NBA, MLB and NFL coverage, a reminder that even in a data-driven media world, narrative still drives engagement.
Why this matters for marketing professionals
These conversations surface three hard demands. First, AI can eliminate nearly half of the repetitive production work that bogs down creative teams, but only if marketers invest in tools and training that let the technology feed - not replace - human creativity. Second, the talent pipeline for AI-literate marketers is broken, and waiting will make hiring harder and more expensive. Third, audiences reward presence in cultural moments, but only when brands create participation, not just placement. The Cannes Lions discussions suggest that the winning playbook combines internal AI fluency with an external focus on story and shared passion.
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