• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Yesterday

CANNES, France -- For all the giddy buzz about the promise of AI, the Lions Festival took on a dystopian tone here during some high-profile panel discussions inside the Palais, especially one featuring powerful signals from Edelman's Trust Barometer.

“In fact, people see AI as globalization 2.0," Edelman CEO Richard Edelman quipped, referring to predictions that over the next three to five years, AI will contribute to massive unemployment as the technology supplants many human jobs.

The observation, which followed Edelman's presentation of data indicating that consumers worldwide have already been battered by a confluence of disruptive changes -- the COVID pandemic/isolation, mounting distrust in experts, geopolitical unrest, and economic inflation -- have actually elevated commercial brands to the most-trusted position of any institutions.

It has also shifted consumer sentiment to an acutely self-centered "me" perspective, especially in terms of what brands can do for individuals, their families, their jobs, and to a lesser extent, their communities.

"It's a stunning rise in the last five years," he said, leading into a panel discussion that evoked even more dystopian angst about the disruptive potential AI will have for society overall.

“I don’t think many of us have fully intellectualized in our brain and accepted in our heart that everything is going to change in like a three-year time frame and we’re going to see a collapse of the 21st Century – a hundred years of progress – will happen in the next five years," predicted Just Capital chair and former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, adding: "We should be extraordinarily aware of the changes that technology is going to bring."

"I don’t think enough people are talking about it. I don’t think everybody knows what AI is," concurred Edelman Vice Chair, former South Carolina Governor and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, adding: "Companies owe it to their employees – they owe it to the public – to let them know that this is what’s going to happen."

Schulman's comments in particular echoed those of an earlier Lions stage conversation featuring Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who also addressed the rapid acceleration of AI -- from earlier and current generations to one expected to usher in an age of "super artificial intelligence -- that will transform society in a more compressed time than any industrial revolution previously in history.

"The shift from the agricultural age to the industrial age to the service age to the information age – all of those shifts happened over decades and so we were able to absorb and so we didn’t really observe changes in unemployment," noted Just Capital's Schulman, adding: "This shift from the information and internet age to the artificial intelligence age is going to happen over the next three to five years.

"We need to be ready for that and it is going to be a tumultuous couple of years."

Speaking to the marketers and agencies attending the session, Edelman concluded: "It's the job of brands to assure people, but to also tell them the truth."