OpenAI's Cannes Debut Signals a New Operating System for Advertising

There was a time when conversations about artificial intelligence at Cannes Lions centred on whether AI would replace copywriters, designers or media planners.

That debate now feels dated.

Making its Cannes Lions debut this year, OpenAI arrived with a far more significant proposition. AI, it argued, is no longer another tool to plug into the marketing stack. It is becoming the operating system that will reshape how agencies, brands and marketing teams work.

For the past two years, marketers have largely viewed AI as a productivity enhancer. It helped write headlines, generate visuals, summarise research and speed up presentations. Useful, certainly. Transformational, perhaps not.

OpenAI believes the industry has entered a new phase.

Speaking during Advertising in the Age of AI, OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser made it clear that the company’s ambitions extend well beyond providing AI software.

“This is the first time we have been here,” she said. “We are excited to tell our story here. We are excited to partner with CMOs and ad agencies.”

That partnership comes at a pivotal moment. Agencies are under growing pressure to deliver faster campaigns, deeper personalisation and measurable business outcomes while operating with leaner teams and tighter budgets.

OpenAI’s message was unmistakable: AI should not simply make existing processes faster. It should fundamentally redesign them.

Beyond Attention

Perhaps Dresser’s most compelling observation was that marketing itself is moving into an entirely different economic model.

“We’ve gone from an awareness era or economy to an intelligence economy,” she said.

For decades, advertising has revolved around capturing attention. Buy media. Interrupt consumers. Hope the message resonates.

Conversational AI changes that equation.

People don’t open ChatGPT looking for advertisements. They arrive with intent. They have questions to answer, problems to solve and decisions to make. That fundamentally changes how brands must engage.

Instead of competing for attention, marketers will increasingly have to earn relevance.

Dresser believes AI’s biggest impact may not even be customer-facing. Instead, it lies behind the scenes, transforming the knowledge work that powers marketing.

“The way we think about this transformation is it’s the work, it’s the knowledge work,” she explained. “Planning a campaign, preparing, researching… All of that can be so much better and faster.”

Creative development, consumer insights, production planning and campaign optimisation are already beginning to merge into AI-assisted workflows where multiple tasks happen simultaneously instead of sequentially.

Rather than replacing strategy or creativity, AI compresses the time between idea and execution.

“This is about reaching more and more people and taking that idea right there and actually scaling it,” Dresser said.

For agencies expected to deliver more with fewer resources, that may prove to be AI’s greatest commercial advantage.

Advertising That Helps

One of the most intriguing discussions centred on advertising inside conversational AI.

Unlike traditional digital advertising, AI conversations cannot rely on interruption. Instead, advertising must become genuinely useful.

“I think it needs to be useful,” Dresser said. “Relevant to what you’re talking about and helpful in the discussion that you’re having.”

She added that advertising in AI environments would become “less attention-grabbing, more useful, more intelligent.”

That represents a profound shift in thinking.

Rather than inserting advertisements into content, brands may increasingly participate in conversations only when they genuinely help users complete a task or make a decision.

Dresser also described a future where AI moves beyond recommending products to helping consumers interact with them. Using virtual beauty experiences as an example, she noted that consumers could increasingly try products before purchasing.

“You can actually try on the product and actually see what the mascara looks like,” she said. Consumer behaviour is changing too.

“Users are not going to search for a keyword, they’re actually going to do something.” Search is becoming interaction, and interaction is becoming participation.

From Tools to Transformation

Another recurring theme was OpenAI’s vision of AI agents working alongside marketing teams.

Referring to OpenAI’s Codex platform, which she said now serves five million weekly active users, Dresser explained that AI agents are expanding beyond software development into broader knowledge work.

“This is the capability of bringing agents into how you market, how you build that marketing campaign,” she said.

Instead of isolated AI tools performing individual tasks, agencies may soon orchestrate multiple specialised AI agents across research, strategy, creative development, production and optimisation.

For Dresser, however, technology is only part of the story.

“This generation of AI and capability is not just a technology transformation; it is a business transformation,” she said.

She argued that organisations create the greatest value when they redesign workflows instead of merely automating existing ones. “Every workflow, every industry can be reimagined.”

That requires leadership. “Executive involvement, reimagining the company, thinking about this as a platform.”

She also warned against abandoning AI initiatives too early. “Staying with it, not giving up, and realising that this is a journey.”

OpenAI’s first appearance at Cannes may ultimately be remembered less for showcasing technology than for challenging the industry to rethink its operating model.

The debate is no longer whether AI belongs in advertising. It does.

The more pressing question is whether agencies and brands are prepared to redesign themselves around AI instead of simply bolting it onto existing processes.

The winners will not necessarily be those with the most advanced AI tools. They will be those that rethink how strategy is developed, creativity is produced, campaigns are optimised and customer relationships are built.

As Dresser concluded, “We’re all learning. We’re really learning and sharing the information and using experimentation.”

For an industry built on constant reinvention, that may have been the most important message to emerge from Cannes this year.