Karen Bennett, managing director US at independent agency Jellyfish, told ExchangeWireTV today that agencies failing to register a seismic shift caused by artificial intelligence are missing what is already happening around them, not what might happen next.

Bennett spoke to ExchangeWireTV in a video interview published this week, recorded on location at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The interview, titled "A Seismic Change in the Agency Ecosystem," runs just over four minutes and covers three areas: how AI is altering the relationship between agencies and their clients, how it is reshaping creative marketing work, and what Bennett considers the most pressing topic facing the industry as it enters Cannes week.

Bennett has spent more than two decades in marketing and media, working across several large holding companies before joining Jellyfish three years ago. She describes herself as based in both New York, where her office sits, and New Jersey, where she lives. Her current role puts her at the center of Jellyfish's US client relationships at a moment when, according to Bennett, artificial intelligence has moved from a topic of conversation to an operational fact embedded in nearly every part of agency work.

A shift agencies cannot avoid noticing

Asked how AI is changing the agency landscape, Bennett did not hedge. "I think if you're not feeling a seismic change, then I don't know what you are doing today," she said. She described the question of whether AI is reshaping the industry as close to a moot one, arguing that the technology has permeated every aspect of how agencies now operate. "I know that we're using AI from every piece of how we are working with clients and it's really bringing them on the journey," Bennett said.

The distinction Bennett draws is not between agencies that use AI and those that do not. It is between agencies still framing AI as a future consideration and those treating it as a present operational requirement. She recounted a conversation with a client who had visited Jellyfish's offices and come away with a reframed sense of urgency. "I didn't see the future. I saw what I need to do right now," the client told her, according to Bennett's account. She said that comment crystallized what she believes the industry conversation needs to become: not a forecast of where AI is heading, but a working answer to what a brand needs to do immediately to stay ahead of competitors operating in the same environment.

That reframing carries operational implications for how Jellyfish structures its work with clients. Bennett described breaking transformation into smaller increments, distinguishing between what a client needs to address immediately and what can wait, even if the available runway is measured in hours rather than months. "How do we break that down into pieces? What you need to do today, what you can wait to do in the next six hours, because it's almost not even tomorrow," she said. The compressed timeframe she describes reflects a broader shift in how agencies frame technological adoption: not as a multi-quarter roadmap, but as a sequence of near-immediate decisions.

Bennett also framed the agency's function during this transition as one of partnership rather than direction. She said clients want a partner who understands and shares the pressure of navigating the shift, rather than one dictating a path from the outside. "You want a real partner who feels and understands and lives and breathes this. So you're doing it together," Bennett said. "It doesn't feel like you're out there on your own."

Creative work and the role of insight

On the relationship between AI and creative marketing, Bennett argued the two should reinforce each other rather than compete. She said creative development has always depended on audience insight and an understanding of what she called human truths, the underlying motivations that shape how people respond to brand storytelling. Her argument is that AI changes the speed at which agencies reach those truths, not their fundamental nature. "Depending on where you are leveraging AI, it is helping you get to those human truths faster," she said. "It is helping you to get to those insights, it's helping you get to those nuggets because you're building it through that insight journey."

Bennett pointed to a specific example of how this works inside Jellyfish's operations. She referenced Pencil, an AI tool the agency uses within workflows that draw on marketing mix modeling, first-party client data, and commerce data. "When we're using Pencil, we're leveraging workflows that are using your MMM, your first party data, that are using your commerce data," Bennett said. According to Bennett, combining those data sources through AI-assisted workflows produces content that connects more directly to consumers because it is built on a foundation of insight data rather than generic assumptions about audience response.

She was direct in rejecting the idea that this approach displaces creative staff. "We never say that any of this is a replacement for creatives. It is meant to build with them," Bennett said. Her framing separates two categories of work: the strategic and interpretive judgment she believes should remain with human creatives, and the more mechanical processing work she believes AI is suited to absorb. "You want humans to be doing the thinking and the strategy and all of that wonderful understanding. But there's parts that humans don't want to do," she said. "So let's use the AI and technology to do that work. And so it really becomes a partnership."

Bennett's expectation is that this division of labor improves rather than dilutes the final creative output. "I think it's going to elevate the creative," she said. "I think it's going to make it resonate more and deliver better to the stories that people want to hear."

What Bennett thinks the industry should actually be asking

Asked what she expected to be the dominant topic heading into Cannes, Bennett predicted a familiar set of themes: AI broadly, agentic workflows specifically, and their application inside creative and commerce contexts. But she argued that the more useful question is different from the one she expects most of the industry to be asking. "I think the question should be what are you doing today? And again, it's not about the future," she said.

Bennett described a pattern in which practitioners treat AI adoption as something that can be deferred without immediate cost. "I think that's where people feel like they can hold on, they can wait a little bit, I'll get to that thing next. And you can't do it next," she said. Her argument is structural rather than promotional: agencies and brands that treat AI adoption as a future milestone risk finding that the competitive environment has moved past the point where catching up is straightforward. "It is staying again one step ahead of the moment. So you're constantly thinking, how do I get ahead of my competitors today?" she said. "And if you're not talking about the today, then the future I don't think matters."

Context: an independent agency inside a consolidating market

Bennett's comments arrive during a week in which AI's role in agency and creative work has been a recurring theme across Cannes Lions 2026 coverage. Publicis Groupe published a mockumentary-style film on June 16 satirizing what chief executive Arthur Sadoun described as "AI pitch-maxxing," his term for agencies overselling AI capabilities in new-business pitches. The same reporting noted that the World Federation of Advertisers had published research on June 15 indicating slow progress among advertisers translating AI enthusiasm into award-worthy creative execution, despite widespread adoption of AI tools across the industry.

Questions about where creative work sits inside the broader agency model have also surfaced independently of AI. Digiday's Cannes briefing, examining shifts in the agency-of-record structure, found that some chief marketing officers have already stepped away from the traditional single-agency model, sourcing creative instead from a wider mix of AI tools, in-house teams, and creator-owned production companies. That dynamic sits adjacent to Bennett's framing: she describes Jellyfish's role as an active, embedded partner working alongside clients through the transition, distinct from an outside vendor issuing a completed brief.

Jellyfish's own position in programmatic and AI-driven advertising has been referenced separately in earlier reporting. According to PPC Land's coverage of OpenAI's ChatGPT advertising pilot, Jellyfish was among the ad agencies participating as the platform's per-thousand-impression pricing fell during the pilot's early months, with the agency's chief of media activation, Jai Amin, cited among executives observing the shift firsthand. Separately, Jellyfish's VP of Brand Strategy, Tom Roach, was quoted in earlier PPC Land coverage of a Funnel-commissioned study on marketing measurement, arguing that data analysis alone cannot explain why campaigns succeed or fail, a distinction that echoes Bennett's own framing of AI as an accelerant for insight rather than a substitute for interpretive judgment.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Bennett's remarks do not describe a product launch, a regulatory change, or a data disclosure. They describe a working philosophy from an executive at an agency that has, according to PPC Land's own reporting, positioned itself at multiple points along the current wave of AI-driven advertising infrastructure, from OpenAI's ad pilot to marketing measurement research. That context matters for a trade audience trying to separate genuine operational change from marketing language attached to AI at Cannes this year.

The distinction Bennett draws between using AI to reach insight faster and using it to replace creative judgment mirrors a tension that has surfaced repeatedly across Cannes Lions 2026 coverage, from Publicis's public skepticism about overstated AI pitches to WFA research documenting a gap between AI adoption and AI-driven creative quality. Bennett's account of Jellyfish's own workflow, built around a tool combining marketing mix modeling, first-party data, and commerce data, offers one specific, named example of how an independent agency says it is applying AI in practice, rather than describing AI adoption in the abstract terms that have characterized much of the surrounding industry conversation this week.

Timeline

  • June 15, 2026: World Federation of Advertisers publishes research indicating slow progress among advertisers translating AI adoption into award-worthy creative execution.
  • June 16, 2026: Publicis Groupe publishes a mockumentary-style film satirizing "AI pitch-maxxing" among agencies.
  • June 22-26, 2026: Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity takes place in Cannes, France.
  • June 30, 2026: ExchangeWireTV publishes its interview with Karen Bennett, "A Seismic Change in the Agency Ecosystem," recorded at Cannes.

Summary

Who: Karen Bennett, managing director US at independent agency Jellyfish, in an interview with ExchangeWireTV.

What: Bennett discussed how artificial intelligence is changing agency-client relationships and creative marketing work, arguing that AI should accelerate insight and free creatives from mechanical tasks rather than replace creative judgment.

When: The interview was published today, recorded during Cannes Lions week, which ran from June 22 to 26, 2026.

Where: Cannes, France, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, with the interview published by ExchangeWireTV.

Why: The comments matter because they offer a specific, named account of how one independent agency says it applies AI in client workflows, using a tool called Pencil that combines marketing mix modeling, first-party data, and commerce data, at a moment when Cannes Lions 2026 coverage has repeatedly surfaced a gap between AI adoption claims and demonstrated creative or operational change.