Steve Phillips, Zappi - Agentic Shopping and the Future of Brands, Insights Lighthouse, Cannes Lions

Recorded at Insights Lighthouse, our Navigating the Sea of Change conference at Cannes Lions 2026. Steve Phillips is the Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Zappi, and has spent his whole career in insight - now with a particular focus on where AI and research meet. In this conversation, he lays out one of the more provocative pictures of the near future you'll hear: a world in which AI agents don't just advise us, but increasingly shop, choose and decide on our behalf. He builds on Kahneman's famous framework to introduce a third mode of decision-making - "System 3" - where agents do as much research as we could ever want, instantly, and bring the whole of the world's information to bear on a single choice. From there he works through what that means for brands: when the buyer is an algorithm reading the back of the pack rather than a human charmed by the front, decades of brand-building meet a very different kind of shopper. He also makes the case that the insights industry, full of curious, data-literate people, is unusually well placed to lead through this shift rather than react to it. Some of what he covers: - "System 3" - the rise of agentic decision-making, after Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 - Why AI agents care about ingredients and the back of the pack, not your brand or your ads - How synthetic data can add real value - as long as the training data behind it is strong - Why the insights industry needs to move from reactive to proactive to stay in the room Zappi is a partner of Insights Lighthouse. 🔗 More about Insights Lighthouse and our upcoming events: https://insights-lighthouse.com/event... #InsightsLighthouse #CannesLions2026 #ConsumerInsights #AI #AgenticAI