After Cannes: The real AI question is agency

After Cannes: The real AI question is agency

Every year, Cannes Lions gives us a signal of where brands, creativity, and business are moving. This year, one thing was impossible to ignore: AI is no longer a future topic. It is already reshaping how ideas are made, how decisions are supported, how content is produced, and how organizations work.

But beneath the excitement around speed, scale, and efficiency, another question is starting to emerge. Not simply what AI can do for us, but what happens to human agency when more of our thinking, deciding, imagining, and making can be outsourced.

This is the tension Christophe Fauconnier, chairman and founder of Innate Motion, came back to after Cannes. As he puts it, “Human growth has never primarily come from efficiency. It has come from friction. From tension. From not knowing — and still finding a way forward.”

That thought feels especially urgent now. For years, organizations have been designed to reduce friction: faster processes, smoother decisions, better predictions, more seamless execution. AI accelerates this logic dramatically. It can help teams generate faster, synthesize faster, decide faster, and produce faster. In many ways, that is progress.

But there is also a risk. When AI removes uncertainty too quickly, it can also remove the moments where judgment, belief, and learning are formed.

The issue is not human versus machine. The deeper tension is agency versus automation.

Are we using AI to help people think better, or to avoid thinking altogether? This is becoming a practical leadership question. Because not all friction is waste. Some friction is developmental. It is where people build judgment, ownership, creativity, relationships, and resilience.

So the challenge for organizations is not to resist AI. It is to design its role more intentionally. There are moments where AI should remove friction because friction blocks energy, creativity, and progress. But there are also moments where human tension needs to remain visible because it builds capability.

That requires leaders to ask a different question: where should AI make work easier, and where should it help people become more capable?

This matters for brand leaders, culture leaders, innovation teams, and executives alike. Organizations are not only systems for performance. They are environments that either strengthen or weaken human agency every day. Every workflow, meeting, process, tool, and decision now carries a hidden design choice: does this help people grow in capability, or does it quietly remove the experience through which capability is built?

The most interesting organizations will not simply be the ones that adopt the most advanced AI tools the fastest. They will be the ones who know what should not be outsourced.

Information can be outsourced. Synthesis can be supported. Execution can be accelerated. But the experience of engaging human tension cannot be fully outsourced without consequence, because that is where growth happens.

This may become one of the defining competitive advantages of the next era: not who uses AI the most, but who uses it in a way that keeps human agency alive.

Cannes reminded us that creativity is changing. In an AI-enabled world, creativity will not only depend on the ability to generate more ideas. It will depend on the ability to stay connected to human tension, cultural meaning, and lived experience.

The future will not be shaped only by who has the most advanced systems. It will be shaped by who designs those systems to make people more capable, not just more assisted.

At Innate Motion, we believe this is where the next conversation on growth needs to go. Because meaningful growth has never come from avoiding tension completely. It comes from participating in it: trying, failing, reflecting, relating, and choosing again.

That is how people grow. That is how organizations grow. And that is how we keep business human in an age of intelligent machines.