Cannes 2026: How agentic AI levels the playing field for indie agencies

Opinion – Cannes Lions preview

You won’t find true agentic AI being sold on a superyacht because it threatens the very companies that pay to play captain for a day. Indies should ignore the allure, writes Converge’s CEO.

With Cannes Lions just around the corner, incumbent AdTech’s very own flotilla of budget-busting boats will be weighing anchor in the famous harbour. Each one hired to blare out a competing, and bloated, version of the future.

All smooth and polished stories, make no mistake, but mostly over-produced tech that’s gated by cost and complexity. You could call it AdTech’s own version of ‘yacht rock’, that middle-of-the-road 70s and early 80s genre of music that took big expensive studios, hordes of session musicians, and full orchestras to produce the desired sound.

A rich man’s form of rock just not accessible to most musicians, and as the yacht parties extravagantly spill onto beach takeovers and parties that sprawl the promenade, you might see a smattering of dated celebrities paid just enough to pretend they enjoy being there. It’s a mixture of lavishness and legacy in the name of selling advertising’s next big thing, and this year nothing’s bigger than agentic AI.

Indie agencies should pay attention: agentic AI can eliminate their technology deficit and put them toe-to-toe with their holdco peers without paying yacht rock prices.

It won’t be the hard-selling unreliable narrators of the ad tech incumbents who indies should be listening to, because true agentic AI will render those same incumbents obsolete.

Behind the superyachts, legacy ad tech’s a sinking ship

Unless struck by morbid curiosity, indie agencies should stick to dry land rather than step foot on a yacht branded with any of ad tech’s big names. After all, who’s really footing the bill? These are the same supply chain intermediaries who presided over digital advertising’s two-decade-long mutation into an acronym-dense labyrinth designed to sap agency spending.

They made the simple act of buying and selling advertising needlessly complicated, then used that complication as an excuse to hide its inner workings in black boxes. Why look inside? You wouldn’t understand anyway. Trust us, the fees are fair.

Large agencies could, begrudgingly, afford to absorb the ballooning tech tax. Indies, meanwhile, were consistently priced out of the game because they lacked the resources to handle this entirely unnecessary operational complexity.

Now these same intermediaries are hitching their bandwagon to agentic AI. But once again, pull back the curtain in ad tech’s Emerald City, and you’ll find a parlour trick rather than an all-powerful wizard. Natural language interfaces and automated API integrations disguise the fact that it’s fundamentally the same old toll-extracting programmatic infrastructure.

They might let you pull a few more levers yourself, but they’ll never hand over the keys to the machine.

No one will sell you their replacement

You won’t find true agentic AI being sold on a superyacht because it threatens the very companies that pay to play captain for a day.

AI agents eliminate the need for intermediaries by allowing buyers and sellers to transact directly, deploying purpose-built agents that can be set up in the morning and trade by the afternoon.

The irony is that, despite all the hype and bluster from the usual suspects, AI agents are simple enough for anyone to use: trainable models taught to perform specific, repeatable tasks at speed and scale. From managing brand safety to predicting viewability or testing bidding variations, any aspect of media buying that is measurable and supported by reliable data can be automated.

Indie agencies don’t need the keys to the expensive yacht rock studio or permission from tech incumbents or Big Tech to perform any of the functions vital to media buying. They can all be set up independently through agents that work solely on their owner’s behalf.

Publishers on the other end can do the same, skipping the entire legacy programmatic supply chain with its decades of tech debt for an entirely new way of trading.

Indies can match bespoke service with bespoke tech

For far too long, indie agencies have been stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, lacking the deep pockets to afford a towering tech stack or the armies of specialists needed to keep it from collapsing.

Now there’s a new indie era of production that removes the operational burden of delivering ambitious, multi-channel campaigns. It allows indies to flex the creative-thinking muscles they’re known for while ticking all the capability boxes brands expect. AI agents level the playing field so that talent alone determines the winner.

Instead of having one vendor providing targeting, another handling measurement, and yet another overseeing brand safety, indie agencies can consolidate all these functions, with agents united by a single thread of buying logic. One agent feeds into another, with all their actions completely transparent and auditable and no fees beyond set-up and support.

By giving the heavy lifting of getting ads in front of consumers to tireless AI agents, stretched agency teams can finally step back from the dashboards and knuckle down on novel, ambitious strategies that secure growth for their clients. Indies sell themselves on bespoke service, and AI agents give them bespoke tech to match.

Soon the gatekeepers will have no gates to keep

Once these autonomous systems spread across the industry, the old gatekeepers of digital advertising will find themselves with no gates left to keep. This Cannes could be their last gasp at relevance, using their ill-gained influence to declare themselves leaders of an agentic AI revolution that’s more likely to turn against them.

Indie agencies, more than anyone, should ignore them. Don’t waste time learning about their agentic solutions; talk to people who will work with you to build your own.

So, skip the yachts, dodge the helicopter rides, resist the lure of a celebrity cameo. None of the ad tech middlemen splashing out on opulent marketing stunts will tell you the truth: they’re the ones who really can be replaced by machines.

Ian Maxwell is the CEO of Converge