Agency bosses say the AI gap with clients is only getting wider

Joe Maglio, CEO Cheil Agency Network, summed it up when he was sharing one of his main takeaways from the week-long event. “The macro AI takeaway: agencies are further along than brands; agencies are the early adopters.”

The more versions of this perspective that got shared, the more it became clear there was a deeper frustration underneath it from others.

The CEO of one of the larger independent holdcos put it more bluntly. Their agency’s AI platform has grown its revenue by triple digits for five straight quarters, they said, and the gap between what it can do and what clients are ready for keeps widening rather than closing.

“The market isn’t catching up,” they said. “They’re actually not catching up because we have stuff now that is so far ahead.” By their count, CMOs are split into four camps: a quarter actively building with AI, a quarter wanting to but unsure how, a quarter frozen, and a quarter still dismissing the whole thing as a fad that won’t touch their job. Asked directly how the industry’s mood had shifted from a year ago, his answer was shorter. “CMOs are lagging.”

Another CEO of a large indie heard the same thing from the marketers he spent the week talking to, minus the confidence. “Most of them are not ready,” they said. “Most of them feel like they’re behind everybody else.” The bigger problem, in their telling, isn’t the gap itself so much as it’s that clients no longer know who to believe about how to close it. Everyone at Cannes had a platform, a proof point, a demo. Few had anything a CMO could actually stand behind in front of their own board.

At another holdco, the diagnosis was less about trust and more about clients asking the wrong questions entirely. One executive there described the typical brief as fixated on the wrong metric altogether: “How many agents does your company have versus how do we measure impact?” In other words, they’re treating agent count as a proxy for progress rather than asking what any of it is supposed to change. “Automation at face value is a race to the bottom,” the executive said, arguing that most marketers “either aren’t asking themselves” what they actually want AI to do, “or they don’t feel they have the internal audience ready” to engage with that question at all. It’s a subtler version of the same complaint: CMOs aren’t just behind on tooling, they’re behind on knowing what to ask for.

But CMOs describe a different set of constraints, not a different set of intentions. 

Data governance, procurement, and legal sign-off move at a pace no agency roadmap accounts for. One exec described a client’s approval process running through their cybersecurity process before a single self-serve tool got greenlit. Budgets haven’t caught up either: several executives described clients trying to fund AI experimentation inside marketing budgets that are already flat or shrinking, with ROI that often doesn’t show up for three to six months, if it shows up at all. Add to that the fact that some CMOs are increasingly the default owner of AI strategy for the whole business, not just marketing, since CIOs are still buried in infrastructure decisions, and “behind” starts to look less like reluctance and more like triage.

“Advertisers are expecting a lot of transparency,” said Jess Dervyn, an analyst in Gartner’s marketing practice. “They want to understand where AI is being used, so agencies have to provide that — they have to be honest and say, ‘this is where we’re using AI.'”

In short, the AI adoption story is not one that can be divided into two clean camps. 

One agency data chief argued the real fault line runs inside the agencies themselves: media businesses, they said, went through their AI reckoning years ago, while creative shops are only now catching up. “On the media side we’ve already had a revolution — media planning, buying, data. On the creative side, it still feels quite fresh”.

Others noted that some of the loudest “advertisers are behind” talk conveniently served the agencies saying it, since being ahead is also, not coincidentally, the pitch.

Still, the pattern held across nearly every conversation Digiday had during Cannes Lions, and ultimately so far this year. Agencies describing sophisticated internal tooling and clients who are, at best, cautiously testing the waters, and at worst unsure what they’re even meant to be testing for. Whether that gap closes — or whether agencies have simply found a convenient new way to justify their fees — is likely to be the argument that follows Cannes home.