Agents of Change at Cannes Lions: What Job Doesn't Exist in 2036?
The Agents of Change interview series, recorded on the Croisette at Cannes Lions 2026. Produced in partnership with AgenticAdvertising.org. Sponsored by Agnitio.
Ask ten people at Cannes what advertising looks like in a decade, and you'd expect ten different answers. We got something closer to one answer, told ten different ways.
That's the thread running through the second reel in our series with the Agents of Change podcast. Where the first episode asked leaders where they already trust an agent today, this one pushes further out: it's 2036 — what job in advertising no longer exists, and what job doesn't have a name yet?
The jobs that disappear
The consensus arrived fast, and nobody sounded nostalgic about it.
Brian O'Kelley put it plainly: the basic, mechanical work such as the paper-pushing at the center of media ops and planning. This is what goes first, because it's soul-crushing and unfulfilling to begin with. Pamela Slea framed the test simply: if a task is just moving numbers from one page to another, or pulling a report nobody enjoys pulling, it's already a task people wish didn't exist — which makes it the first thing agents take off their plate. Matic Tribuson hopes the same is true of ad ops specifically, calling it exactly the kind of work agents are suited to absorb. And Gabriel DeWitt named the function directly: building dashboards and running reports stops being human work. What stays human, he was careful to note, is turning those insights into action.
Zoom out, and the pattern is unmistakable: nobody is mourning the loss of dashboard-building or copy-pasting between systems. The jobs disappearing are the ones built to compensate for software that was never designed with humans in mind.
The jobs that emerge
That's where the predictions got more interesting and where the panel started reaching for job titles that don't exist yet.
Gabriel DeWitt described a new category entirely: the agent orchestrator, managing workflows that are neither a team of people nor a simple piece of software, but something new in between. Ben Williams predicted a VP of Agentic on the org chart. Sarah Acker sees a similar role taking shape as the cross-functional owner of everything agentic inside a company — only half-joking that some will end up calling it the "AI Czar." Chinmayi Bettadapur offered the line of the segment, predicting an entirely new meaning for the phrase "talk to my agent." Mike Chevallier tied it back to accountability: the people who thrive will be the ones who put real effort into training agents and providing strategic oversight, engaging clients on how to actually use AI well throughout planning and execution. Priti Ohri saw the same shift from a different angle: the base-level jobs don't vanish so much as get upgraded, pushing everyone toward more strategic thinking.
And Brian O'Kelley closed the segment with the title that stuck with us most: the dreamer. His argument was simple: the one thing AI still can't do is dream up the big, non-linear idea that sounds ridiculous right up until it isn't. That instinct, he argued, is what the creative jobs of the future are actually built on.
From paper-pushers to dreamers
Run the two lists side by side and the throughline is hard to miss. Every job disappearing was built to compensate for something: a form nobody wanted to fill out, a report nobody wanted to pull. Every job emerging asks for something no agent can supply on its own: judgment, oversight, strategic thinking, or the plain human instinct to dream up something that's never been done. That's not a coincidence. It's the same argument AAO has been making since day one, just told this time by ten people who'll be the ones living it.
What's coming next
One theme still ahead in this series: where human judgment stays non-negotiable, no matter how far agentic advertising scales. That's where AAO President Benjamin Masse makes his case for the standard the whole organization is built around: Embedded Human Judgment. Approval is built into the process before an agent acts, it is logged and traceable, and not discovered after the fact. More on that soon.
Watch episode two: Agents of Change Podcast | What Job Doesn't Exist in 2036? | AAO at Cannes Lions 2026 and see the full AAO at Cannes Lions playlist here.
Go deeper: Read AAO's whitepaper, Building the Future of Marketing, and explore the Ad Context Protocol at agenticadvertising.org.
Join us: AAO membership is open to brands, agencies, publishers, and technology companies who want to shape the future of AI and advertising. Become a member today.
Agents of Change was produced in partnership with AgenticAdvertising.org and sponsored by Agnitio.