Blog post
Cannes Lions 2025: How AI is breaking creative barriers and making buying personal
Sure, nobody needs another Cannes Lions 2025 recap. But you do need to hear about the biggest shifts happening in marketing and advertising. And whether you made it to the Croisette or not, we explored all the topics across three days and 25 sessions at the Microsoft Beach House and on the mainstage.
Microsoft Advertising engaged in authentic conversations about creative work, the people behind it, and the tools that shape it that leveled up to one big idea: how to build the next evolution of audience engagement.
This year’s talks were candid and practical, with AI leaders discussing agentic futures and creators addressing burnout. We covered everything from gaming to privacy, from innovation to personalization, and from inclusion to the agentic future. Here are the standout moments and why it matters for the work of all advertisers ahead…
No more stalling, spiraling, or second-guessing
Our week opened with a full house at the Microsoft Creators Lounge, where creator Alix Earle, whose content reaches millions weekly, sat down with Yusuf Mehdi, EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft. They explored what it really means to be a creator today, including the pressures, vulnerability, and the need to build something lasting.
Earle discussed the emotional demands of sharing your life with an audience and the constant pull to stay relevant. She remembered asking herself what would happen with her content after college graduation: “What if no one likes me anymore? What if I don’t have the same things to post about?”
Yusuf Mehdi and Alix Earle in discussion on a colorful stage at the Microsoft Creators Lounge at Cannes Lions 2025.
Today, when she’s creatively stuck, she uses tools like Microsoft Copilot to keep moving ahead. “It's been a really helpful tool for me,” she explained, particularly when needing someone to bounce ideas off while working alone from her living room table.
Throughout the evening, creators talked about stepping back from content "hamster wheels" to build something more substantial. They're forming genuine partnerships, sharing resources, and creating support networks that extend beyond follower counts. Collaboration, not competition, is defining the next wave of creator-led marketing.
Clearing the path to AI-amplified creativity
On day 2, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman joined Colleen DeCourcy, Former Chief Creative Officer at Snap, Inc., on the Cannes Mainstage to explore how AI is changing creativity. The conversation focused on how AI can perform as a partner and an accelerator, helping to reduce overload, extend imagination, and free creative energy for higher-value thinking.
Mustafa Suleyman and Colleen DeCourcy in discussion at the mainstage of Cannes Lions 2025.
Suleyman urged the creative industry to embrace this shift, highlighting that we’re at a pivotal moment where AI can radically amplify human imagination and productivity. He argued that as AI tools become universally available, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less.
“AI capabilities are going to be commodities,” he told attendees at the packed Debussy Theatre. “Creativity, grit, hustle, resilience, risk taking—these are the qualities that will make the difference.”
In his recap, he reiterated how AI is making craft a bigger differentiator, even as it lowers barriers to entry: “Barrier goes down, bar goes up.”
Rethinking ads from interruption to invitation
Later that day, Kya Sainsbury-Carter, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Advertising, took the stage with Melody Lee, CMO of Mercedes-Benz USA, to talk about how Showroom ads are bringing exploration back into digital shopping.
“We have to think about more ways to answer the question: How do you do more with less?” said Lee during her session. “We’re all being asked that question as marketers up and down the Croisette... and AI gives us a huge leap towards that opportunity.”
Conversational ad formats invite people to explore, ask, compare, and learn, all within the ad experience in Copilot. It’s a big shift from static placements, meeting customers where they are: curious, selective, and ready to make informed decisions.
The pilot, launched in partnership with Mercedes-Benz and OMD, demonstrated how ad experiences can feel less like interruptions and more like invitations.
Making time for work that matters
Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s Chief Scientist, offered a thoughtful approach to how AI has changed the future of work. Rather than focusing on output or optimization, she encouraged the audience to have meaningful conversations and ask deeper questions beyond tasks like summarizing an email.
She spoke about how AI can be a thought partner; not doing the work for us, but challenging us, and helping us think more deeply about strategy, storytelling, decision-making, and reflection.
To help calm anxiety about how AI will reshape advertising and other areas of marketers’ work, she encouraged attendees to form hypotheses, run experiments, share results, and not fear failure.
“I actually argue that people should be leading like scientists right now,” she noted on LinkedIn. “Science is essentially a methodology that allows us to handle ambiguity.”
When AI moves from wow to now
On day 3, Rukmini Iyer, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Advertising Engineering & MSN, explored how digital engagement is evolving to become more conversational, personalized, and agentic.
Classic ad formats are disappearing. Instead of clicking through websites and apps, people increasingly interact with brands through conversations. “The most successful marketers are building intuitive connections between people, brands, publishers, and ad platforms,” Iyer observed.
She highlighted examples with Simona Ieseanu, Head of Marketing D2C at Samsung Electronics Germany, demonstrating how this approach translates into practical applications that feel less like advertising and more like helpful guidance.
Partnering with their media agency Starcom, Samsung used Copilot in Microsoft Advertising Platform to reduce campaign analysis and reporting time by 30% to 40%, enabling faster optimization and a shorter learning phase. The Samsung case study reveals how, as advertisers try to build and run better campaigns, AI is becoming less of a curiosity and more of a quiet, reliable engine.
Bonus: What Cannes Copilot do for you?
In addition to our curated sessions, throughout the event, we showcased how to make the most of Copilot—your personal AI companion, designed to learn and grow with you. Explore Copilot now, including Image Creator, Copilot Vision, and Copilot Voice.
Two people collaborating on a Copilot image creation demo at a wooden table at the Microsoft Beach House at Cannes Lions 2025.
The best part of Cannes is where we’re headed next
Cannes Lions 2025 was about listening, thinking, and reconnecting with what really matters: helping marketers and creatives do their best work without burning out, selling out, or falling behind.
To the industry partners who made these conversations possible, thank you. These collaborations enriched our conversations and expanded the impact of our sessions both inside and outside the Microsoft Beach House. Your presence helped bring our ideas to life and gave them depth.
And if you need some inspiration for what’s next for audience engagement, check out our latest resources where creativity meets AI:
Plus, connect with us on LinkedIn. The future of advertising is here, and you don't want to miss a moment!
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