A core theme of this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was the power of generative AI to support and enable creativity. For marketing teams in any industry, there’s an exciting opportunity to leverage machine learning to speed up ad prototyping, creative testing, and insights extraction—but the key to success is using the technology strategically to supercharge, rather than replace human effort and talent.
At the festival’s Stage Zero by Makers AI, Swayable CEO James Slezak joined Denise Colella, VP of the Global Digital Strategy Group at Adobe; Teresa Fusaro, Senior Director of Marketing Activation Tech & Digital at Reckitt; and Lucy Iannotti, Global Categories and EMEA Production Director at Haleon to unpack how AI is transforming the creative process.
“The vision here, at this festival of creativity, is empowering creatives with AI—not attempting to replace them,” said James.
The session explored how the evolution of AI is shaping two major shifts in modern marketing:
1. AI scales creative prototyping, testing, and efficiency
Brands are expected to deliver more content, across more platforms, in more formats than ever before. But instead of using AI to replace talent, marketing teams are finding success by using machine learning to automate the most repetitive and time-consuming parts of the creative process—freeing up talent to focus on high-impact ideas.
Colella at Adobe shared that using the brand’s generative AI tool Adobe Firefly enables creative teams to quickly generate ad prototypes—from images to video to audio—helping them focus more on big-picture storytelling.
“What creative has ever said, ‘I can’t wait to change that background from blue to yellow’?,” said Colella. “Creatives have amazing ideas, and they want to tell their stories beautifully. Some of the rote things they have to do can easily be taken care of through gen AI capabilities.”
From a creative agency perspective, Iannoti at Haleon said that she has briefed agencies about the benefits of using AI tools and automation processes, and was initially concerned about pushback about the technology removing the ability to be creative. However, most reaction has been the opposite, with agency teams willing to embrace AI to conduct efficient creative testing and prototyping.
“What I’ve heard from creative agencies is: ‘You’re allowing me to focus more on the big idea, not the long tail of 300-plus executions that I have to deliver as part of my toolkit, whether I end up using them or not,” said Iannotti.
Swayable’s take: As an AI-native platform, Swayable sees brands and agencies leverage the technology to drive efficiency every day. Integrating AI-powered creative prototyping into marketing strategies unlocks the greatest value of rapid pre-testing. Swayable works with brands to enact these integrations and build on prototyping capabilities.
2. AI accelerates insights extraction to drive agile marketing decisions
Equally important is how AI is transforming the pace and precision of generating insights. Brands that previously relied on lengthy research cycles are now embedding AI into workflows to surface meaningful insights in real time—fueling smarter, faster decisions.
Fusaro at Reckitt described how her company has integrated AI across marketing functions that include data and insights:
“We started our gen AI enterprise program at the end of 2023, with the objective to reinvent marketing functions,” said Fusaro. “For insights and productivity, we already see gen AI being an integral part of some of the marketing workflows. We can remove some of the repetitive work from our marketers so they can focus on more added-value tasks.”
Colella at Adobe added that AI isn't just accelerating insights—it’s also helping brands overcome talent bottlenecks to support data and insights teams.
“We can't hire fast enough,” said Colella. “In some cases, we’re using AI agents that can create a data scientist to support you. That doesn’t erase the need for human input—it bolsters it.”
Swayable’s take: Swayable is leveraging AI to analyze validated human responses across thousands of campaigns, faster than ever before. The technology has helped reduce the time it takes to extract insights from months to days. What’s perhaps most important is that while advanced machine learning is fueling major lifts in measurement effectiveness, it’s not replacing real consumers—it’s allowing teams to access and analyze consumer data faster to inform proactive decision-making.
The final takeaway: empowering vs. replacing creativity
Across industries, a new paradigm is emerging around AI. The technology isn’t a shortcut for cutting costs or replacing human talent—it’s a strategic lever for marketers to boost testing and insights speed, quality, and scale, without sacrificing human creativity and talent.
Swayable is excited to be a part of this shift. Our platform allows marketers to use AI automation to test prototypes and generate rapid insights into what drives lift among real consumers. In turn, these insights enable marketers to make agile creative decisions—and build stronger, strategic brands that operate at the speed of culture.