June 22 2026, 12:52 pm | BY Ricki Green | No Comments
Tim Devine, AKQA Global Chief Invention Officer, is representing Australia on the Cannes Digital Craft Lions jury. As judging gets underway in the South of France, Devine shares his insights from inside the jury room, exclusive to CB.
People who know me will understand that I feel like an impostor at Cannes. But being here as a judge means I get to do the thing I love most, talking about ideas and the work behind them. It happened at the opening of the judging tonight, when I fell into a long conversation with Phil, who chairs the festival.
We circled AI, as everyone does. I’m honestly a bit sick of talking about it, but one thread stuck with me: at what point does AI become part of the judging itself? It feels inevitable, or at least unavoidable as a decision. And if it is, the real question isn’t technical. It’s whether we hand judgment over, or whether judgment turns out to be one of the last genuinely human acts. Maybe deciding what’s good is a foolish thing we do. Maybe it’s the most human thing there is. Maybe it’s something we’ll end up sharing with the machines. I don’t know yet, and I like not knowing. What I do know is that the execution will be nuanced, and how we interface with AI in judging should itself be a creative act.
That led us to events, and why they matter more now, not less. When almost anything can be generated, the thing that can’t be faked is being in a room together. I keep thinking about seeing the band Fugazi years ago, and the way they talked about live music as something you have to show up for. We’ve lost a lot of social, communal rituals over the years and got cynical about them. I think we’re quietly hungry for them again.
The sharpest part was sport and music. Both are entertainment, but music is being reshaped and unsettled by AI in a way sport simply isn’t. Sport feels protected. That gap, between the culture AI can flood and the culture it can’t, is something my team and I have been circling for a while. This conversation pulled it into focus.
Day 1. Shortlisting.
Long first day, all shortlisting. The thread that stuck with me was what makes a piece great. Impact, fit for the category, or just a genuinely interesting idea? What I found interesting as a juror is that at this stage it didn’t have to be all three. A piece could be stronger on one than the others and nothing got cut for being light somewhere. All three counted, and any of them could carry a piece through. Tomorrow is where it gets pointed, weighing those dimensions properly now we’re into the detail.
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