For Czech readers, Steven Bartlett is mainly the voice of The Diary Of A CEO podcast. At June's Cannes Lions he made the case for what makes creators irreplaceable at a time when AI can produce and distribute content almost for free. He added one line to a clip from the stage: “to achieve great things you have to be deeply committed to the impact you want to create, but completely UNROMANTIC about how you create it.” The goal is sacred. The path to it is just technique.
What Bartlett said at Creator Beach
The panel was called “From Creator to CEO: Building Scalable Brands with AI”, and on 22 June Bartlett sat alongside David Wadhwani, who leads the Creativity & Productivity business at Adobe. The panel description sums up the thesis Bartlett brought with him. The most influential creators are moving into the role of company operators and treating AI as invisible infrastructure.
The key line of the description reads “the true competitive advantage is no longer speed, but creative direction, taste, and leadership.” When AI speeds up production, distribution and decision-making, the field levels out in the place where winning once went to whoever could finish the most pieces in a day. Taste, direction and the ability to lead a team stay on top. Bartlett's remark that there is no point clinging to a way of making things is simply an operational version of the same idea. The payoff lies in decisions about direction, while machines take over more and more of the craft of production itself.
Why Adobe is saying this
According to Adweek, Adobe became the main partner of the new Lions Creators section for the first time, its biggest Cannes investment to date, after doubling its spending in 2025. It did not disclose the amount. On Creator Beach it set up a podcast studio and showcased its tools for creators.
On the company blog from Cannes, Adobe describes creators as “one of the most powerful forces in marketing today” and as “storytellers, entrepreneurs and modern media companies in their own right”. A toolmaker is thereby saying that the tool itself is no longer the scarce thing. As a business position, that holds up. When everyone has access to the same AI, Adobe needs the value to stay in taste and in the brand around the tool, because that is what sells its more expensive software and the services around it.
Storytellers become operators
The panel description goes further and claims that creators “are no longer just storytellers, they are founders, operators, and brand builders”. Bartlett is a fitting proof of that thesis. The agenda lists him as founder of Steven.com and host of The Diary Of A CEO at once, that is, as a person who has built a business with its own processes and people around his name.
For a brand that hires creators, this changes what it is buying. Reach can be bought through advertising. Direction and a feel for the audience, which hold content together, sit in one person and the team around them, and cannot be transferred. A brand director in Prague weighing a collaboration with a creator is therefore increasingly negotiating with a small media company that stands behind one face and has its own rate card, formats and audience data.
Bartlett's line from Cannes is therefore the language of an operator. Anyone who builds a company around their own name talks about producing content as a set of decisions that can be managed and scaled.
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