At the Bloomberg Studios in Cannes, Bloomberg Media chief commercial officer Christine Cook and HSBC CMO for corporate and institutional banking Nicole German joined me to discuss the current and future shifts as media moves into an agentic era. The conclusion: Lots of change is still to come, but the one thing that won’t change much is that humans will continue to trust other humans rather than handing over important decisions to robots. Topics we discuss:

• Agents as the next algorithm, not a new paradigm: Christine argues agentic AI is best understood as an evolution of the same discoverability dynamics that reshaped Twitter, Meta and LinkedIn over the past decade. She contends that whoever builds and programs an agent will bake in an angle or motivation, meaning marketers should expect the same unpredictable shifts they've already lived through with platform algorithms.

• The barbell between digital hype and live connection: Christine makes the case that the industry's energy is badly out of balance, with far too much attention on agentic AI and not enough on why executives still fly across the world to sit at a table together. She points to the disconnect at Cannes itself, where billboards promise a fully automated future while attendees pack parties and roundtables in search of in-person contact.

• Why high-stakes B2B deals still require humans in the room: Nicole draws a firm line for HSBC, stating the bank has no plans to let agents make decisions without human intervention on large, multi-jurisdictional transactions. She frames AI as an input into the process, useful for surfacing insights, but not a substitute for the trust built when a team of humans is physically present with a client.

• The disorienting new mechanics of agent-based discoverability: Nicole describes HSBC's early efforts to optimize for GEO and AEO as "a bit of Whac-A-Mole," requiring the bank to rebuild its websites for technical findability and even write an internal playbook for making RFPs discoverable inside clients' proprietary agents. It's a sign that even sophisticated B2B marketers are still reverse-engineering rules for a fundamentally different kind of search.

• AI's dividend is time, not fewer people: Both guests push back on predictions of marketing job losses, arguing instead that efficiency gains free up capacity for deeper client work and creative judgment. Christine notes that marketing organizations have historically operated lean already, while Nicole frames the goal as more time spent on the craft of marketing rather than simply producing more output.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:27 Beehiiv Spot

• 02:49 Welcome

• 03:13 Agentic AI Hype Check

• 05:28 Bloomberg AI From Bottom Up

• 07:36 HSBC Clients and AI Search

• 10:39 Marketing to Agents Soon

• 13:09 AEO and Algorithm Evolution

• 21:30 Experiential Marketing and Trust

• 28:16 Curated Rooms Build Integrity

• 30:19 In House vs Partner Media

• 34:08 Brands Becoming Media

• 36:42 Direct to Audience Strategy

• 38:36 Creators in Regulated Finance

• 44:54 AI Inside Marketing Teams

• 49:13 AI Inside Bloomberg Operations