Last week I was at the Sandbox cabana at Cannes Lions 2026, for a panel called "The New Creator Playbook: Influence, AI, & the Future of Brand-Creator Relationships."
The panel was moderated by Jennifer Quigley-Jones, VP of Strategy & Partnerships at PMG. The panelists were Zachery Dereniowski (one of the most-followed creators currently working in the brand-collaboration space), Lauri Metrose (Chief Communications Officer at Expedia), and Leah Walker (Director of Influencer & Creator Marketing at Adobe).
The conversation went where most AI conversations at Cannes go this year, the new measurement tools, the operational AI use cases, the question of how authenticity survives when content production becomes faster and cheaper. Useful, well-argued, the kind of session you walk out of with three good notes.
But what I actually came for was the question I asked at the end:
"What's the one thing you wish AI would make easier and less manual?"
I asked it of all four panelists. And what struck me was that they all answered, in their own words, the same thing.
Scaling the business.
This article is about what they meant by that, why I think the answer is right, and the part of the scaling problem nobody on the panel raised, which is also the part Talentir spends most of its time on.
What "Scaling" Actually Means in Creator Marketing
When four senior people who do different jobs in the same industry converge on the same answer, the word matters less than what they each meant by it. Here's roughly how the four answers landed across the panel:
- Scaling the team across markets. Hiring effectively in multiple countries, finding the right local creator-marketing leads, building local creative and operational capacity. AI helps surface candidates and accelerate hiring workflows, but most of the actual judgement work still sits with humans.
- Finding the right creators at scale. Discovery is the most-promised AI use case in this space, and the place where it's furthest from being solved well. The panel's frustration was specific: AI tools are good at finding creators, less good at predicting fit, and almost no use at predicting partnership longevity.
- Operating campaigns across many creators simultaneously. The administrative complexity of running 50 active creator partnerships in parallel scales unpleasantly. Brief management, deliverable tracking, approval cycles, performance measurement, each one is a workflow that bends under volume.
- Paying creators across geographies. This came up briefly. It got nodded at, then the conversation moved on. Which is fair, it's not a topic that fits a creative-marketing panel's natural rhythm. But it's the part of scaling that I think about most.
Where AI Is Genuinely Helping (and Where It Isn't)
The honest pattern, based on the panel and the broader conversation I had during the week:
AI is helping meaningfully in:
- Creator discovery and shortlisting
- Brief drafting and creative ideation
- Performance measurement and attribution
- Content moderation and review at volume
AI is helping marginally in:
- Predicting brand-creator fit (better than random but still rough)
- Contract drafting (templates with smart fill, not yet end-to-end)
- Cross-market team hiring (sourcing yes, judgement no)
AI is not yet solving:
- The operational complexity of paying creators across geographies
- Compliance handling across multiple jurisdictions
- Currency conversion and FX optimisation at scale
- The trust-and-relationship management piece that determines whether creators come back
The last category is interesting because it's where the real scaling friction lives. AI can find you 50 creators in 30 minutes. It can draft your briefs in 5. It can measure performance overnight. But the moment you're paying 50 creators across 12 countries in 8 currencies, your finance team's workload doesn't scale linearly with AI, it scales linearly with the underlying payment infrastructure, which most companies haven't modernised.
Which is the part of the scaling story nobody on the panel was going to raise.
The Scaling Bottleneck That Doesn't Get Talked About at Cannes
Here's the version I think about most. AI-enabled creator marketing produces an operational pattern that looks like this:
- More creators discovered per quarter
- Briefs produced faster, so more campaigns launched in parallel
- More markets entered because the discovery and brief work no longer constrains expansion
- More content produced because creative throughput accelerates
- More performance data analysed because measurement runs continuously
Every single one of these adds outbound payment volume. More creators paid. Across more countries. In more currencies. With more invoicing complexity. With more compliance overhead.
If your AI stack is solving the campaign-side scaling problem but your payment workflow is still the same EUR-bank-rail-plus-PayPal setup you had two years ago, the AI is accelerating the front end of a process whose back end can't keep up. The bottleneck just moves.
This is what I mean when I say payments are the under-discussed half of the scaling story. The good news is that this part is also genuinely solvable, it just doesn't fit on a creator-marketing panel because it's an infrastructure conversation, not a creative one.
What Modern Payment Infrastructure Looks Like in the AI-Scaling Era
At Talentir, the version of "scaling" we focus on is what happens after the AI surfaces the right creators and the campaign goes live. The properties that make a payment workflow keep up with AI-accelerated campaign volume:
- 60+ currencies** from a single funding balance**, so adding a new market doesn't add a finance project
- Recipient picks their method and currency, bank transfer, PayPal, Venmo, or stablecoin, in their preferred currency. The brand never makes a per-creator decision.
- Automatic compliant invoicing, generated at the moment of payment, in the right format for each jurisdiction. No chasing.
- One operational view, every payment, every creator, every market in one dashboard, exportable to your accounting system in one click
- Compliance absorbed at the platform level, DAC7, VAT, KYC handled in the background so your team doesn't grow with your jurisdiction count
This is the operational shape that lets AI-accelerated creator marketing actually scale instead of just appear to scale until finance hits its breaking point.
What I Took Home From Cannes
The panel was right that scaling is what AI should make easier. They were right that it's the consensus pain across the industry right now. And they were right to focus on the parts of scaling that are visible from the marketing side, hiring, discovery, brief operations.
The additional thing I took home is that the invisible half of scaling, the payment infrastructure underneath, is the part that will determine whether the AI-accelerated creator marketing stack actually delivers the volume gains the industry is promising, or whether it just shifts the bottleneck downstream to the finance team.
For brands and agencies thinking about their 2027 creator marketing build-out, the question to add to the planning conversation: "if our AI stack succeeds at the front end, can our payment workflow handle what that produces at the back end?"
Most teams haven't asked it yet. The ones that have are already operating at the scale the rest of the industry is still aspiring to.
The Short Version
Four senior leaders at one of the best creator marketing panels of Cannes Lions 2026 all said the same thing when asked what AI should make easier: scaling. They were right. They were also speaking from the marketing-side view of scaling, which makes sense for a marketing panel.
The view from the payment-side is that scaling is bottlenecked less by the campaign work and more by the infrastructure underneath it. AI is genuinely accelerating the campaign side; modern payment infrastructure is what lets the rest of the operation keep up.
