Ask anyone on the Croisette this week what’s transforming the industry and you’ll get the same words, delivered with the same confidence, regardless of who’s talking. AI. Efficiency. Agentic. Orchestration. Spend a few hours listening to the version of the conversation that happens after the panel ends — at dinner, over a second bottle of rosé nobody ordered — and a different story starts to surface, one with considerably less polish.
“No one really admits openly as to how much they’ve been burning to develop,” said Ian Maxwell, CEO at ad tech business Converge Digital, on the discourse around the cost of AI at the festival. “We know in our own use case if you throw a whole code base at it the costs become absolutely astronomical and with the rise in token costs it’s now a case where it is vastly more costly than simply having engineers.”
For him, the point is that AI augments his engineers in a supervised and managed manner. Or as he put it: “It means we can still get three times the productivity — real world of course, not the 10 times claims that float around in the ether — which only really exist for super specific use cases without exposing everything to the AI, and thus avoiding those massive costs.”
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