• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time this week since his election as Pope. He revealed that he had chosen his papal name because of the technology revolution.

He explained that his namesake, Leo XIII, stood for the “rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Pope addressed artificial intelligence (AI) as an “existential threat” to humanity this week as executives in the advertising industry at Cannes Lions reflected on how the technology will affect their world.

Google, Microsoft, Cisco and other technology leaders have debated the philosophical and societal implications of increasingly intelligent machines.

But this week at the Cannes Lions, festival attendees told MediaPost the topics grew broader. They said topics spanned from how AI will work with humans in singularity to  how much filming celebrities and creators will do with a pen and camera, given the proliferation of AI tools.

“The hot take is that just a few seconds of creator film can produce dozens of ads with AI,” Zak Ringelstein, CEO and founder of Zigazoo, which focuses on digital safety for kids, wrote in an email to MediaPost. The assumption is that “each would then get a small test budget, and the best performing would then scale.”

This could create what Ringelstein described as “unbelievable” efficiencies on platforms where tens of millions of user-generated content (UGC) frames are tested daily.

Zigazoo, a social-media platform for kids, is backed by investors like Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures, Charli D’Amelio, and Jimmy Kimmel, as well as NBA, MaC Venture Capital, and Wheelhouse Entertainment. 

Jessy Magor, senior director of marketing and growth at The Variable, an independent creative agency, believes AI moves the industry from measurement to meaning.

“It’s not just sentiment scoring or keyword tracking anymore,” Magor wrote in an email to MediaPost. “We’re talking real-time analysis of tone, context, and emotional resonance. That shift means we’re not just listening better, we’re responding smarter. And that’s what clicks, sticks, and builds connection."

AI drives the ways advertising works, from large-scale data analysis and rapid insights to powering the power of personalization, market response and optimization, according to Andy Berkenfield, CEO and partner at Duncan Channon, an independent, integrated advertising and design agency based in San Francisco.

He has taken note of many conversations at Cannes around how people and AI will work together. “The need for humanity and the human touch is a constant refrain in all the talks I've attended, but the answer to the question depends very much on what conversation you happen to participate in,” Berkenfield wrote in a letter to MediaPost. “There appear to be strong opinions on all sides of the debate.”

Agencies are attempting to find the answer in practical adoption of applications, Berkenfield said, adding that it expects to soon see “trends and patterns emerge.”

This week Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote a letter to employees detailing how AI will change every part of Amazon, from silicon to the ways it supports consumers to how many employees Amazon will need to achieve all this.

Microsoft reportedly is planning thousands more job cuts in sales and other departments.

Reports suggest the move will take effect some time at the beginning of the company’s new fiscal year, which starts in July.