Fast Five with Reuben Halper

Insights From Women Driving AI Startups

Cannes had a ton of AI talk this year. Most were a mix of hype, fear, and lots of buzzwords. Our GM of the Americas, Carolyn Murphy, joined a conversation worth listening to at Salon Culture Conversations: Women Entrepreneurs Driving AI Startups.

It brought together four founders/AI leaders who are doing the thing everyone’s talking about,  but doing it with intention, creativity, and a whole lot of focus on people over product.

And the themes that came through couldn’t align more with how we build: AI isn’t here to replace humans, it’s here to make creative humans even more powerful.

AI isn’t the star. People are.

Everyone on the panel came to AI not because it was trendy, but because it solved a real, human problem, like faster staffing in entertainment, clearer emotional insight from voice, better discovery in ecommerce. For us at Springboards, it’s about helping strategists and creatives get to smarter ideas faster without losing the joy, weirdness, and originality of the work.

As Carolyn put it on stage: “We’re not building to automate execution. We’re building to unlock new creative ways in.”

Being AI-native doesn’t mean flashy. It means useful.

The best products on that stage were showing results. Purva Gupta from Lily AI framed it perfectly: AI isn’t electricity, it’s electricity that proves its value. At Springboards, our value is time saved, thinking unblocked, and pitches won. That’s what being AI-native means to us: delivering something real.

Execution is cheap. Insight isn’t.

This theme ran through the whole session. Everyone agreed that AI should streamline production, not strategy. Carolyn framed it well: “We’re here to support the thinkers, not replace them. The best creative still comes from people who feel, who talk to others, who know what’s happening in culture.”

That’s why we don’t do content automation. We’re not here to make ads faster. We’re here to help you get to better starting points, so you can make something worth watching.

Listen harder. Move faster. Stay weird. 

Every speaker on stage made one thing clear: the best AI products are shaped by their customers, not their founders.

Same goes for us. Some of Springboards’ best features have come directly from strategists telling us where they’re stuck, what’s not working, or what would help them get to a bigger idea, quicker.

The TL;DR:

AI isn’t a strategy. It’s a tool. What matters is what you do with it — and why you’re doing it. The founders on this panel aren’t just using AI. They’re building companies that respect creativity, center human insight, and move fast without losing the plot.

That’s exactly how we build Springboards. Because the future of creative work isn’t automated. It’s amplified.

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Name

James Hurman, Founding Partner, Previously Unavailable

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How do you define creativity?

Original, engaging ideas, beautifully crafted.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

A friend in the right hands (good strategy people using it as a springboard, good creative people with great taste using it as a production tool) and a foe in the wrong hands (poor strategy or creative people, or anyone in marketing, using it to conceive and produce average work).

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

Basically any big Lion-winner. But I'm going to pick on Heinz' 'Ketchup Fraud' as I don't think an LLM would ever be in a position to notice a restaurateur pouring cheap ketchup into a Heinz bottle.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

Around the back of a service station in Pakuranga. It was under a random big sheet of cardboard that someone had spilled quite a lot of JD's and coke on. It was quite cold and the idea looked sad and quite sketchy but I could tell it was a great one. I was nervous about just taking it because there was a security camera there, but I had a hoodie on so I pulled up my hood and put my sunglasses on and turned away from the camera and grabbed it. Then a woman came busting out the back door of the service station and saw me and shouted something about me smelling like JDs, not realising that it was the cardboard and not me. I was going through a period of using quite a lot of Lynx Africa so I was pretty confident I didn't smell of JDs and instead I would most likely have been giving off an aromatic, woody, powdery oriental accord opening with notes of lime, mandarin, lavender, apple and galbanum which lead to a heart of geranium, rose, Jasmin and lily on a base of cedarwood, sandalwood, amber, musks, patchouli, Tonka, vanilla and moss. Anyway, the woman was pretty grunty and came at me hard. I was shitting myself so I dropped the idea and ran really fast down the road and then hid behind one of those old telephone exchange boxes for a while until it was safe to come out. Then I walked home and watched an old episode of M*A*S*H to calm down.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Talking to ChatGPT in audio mode to understand things that I'm thinking about or working on. It's great for constant fact checking or deepening my understanding really quickly without needing to switch tabs or context switch.

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Who are you?

Gabrielle Tenaglia, Head of Marketing, Lettuce

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How do you define creativity?

When solving problems, its common for people and businesses to ask the same questions and use similar processes...which leads them to similar answers. In marketing its a key reason why so much of the communications in each category look and sound the same. Creativity is about asking different questions and using a different process to open up new options--not just ones that are different from what your competitors are saying, but ones that your competitors could not say. In marketing, creativity is taking your strategy, your messaging and your communications assets to a place where your competitors can't follow you.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

It can be either. Like any other technology tool, It depends 100% how you use it.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

This was produced with AI, but developed and written by humans. AI is so much about pattern recognition and doing things that are similar to what you've done before. This is so different than what exists out there in the tax and accounting space that no AI could have come up with it.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

All my great ideas happen when I'm not working. Lately some of my ideas have come from thinking about my grandmother. When she died and we cleaned out her house, we found all of these bundles of money hidden away in different places tied up with ribbons. I'm working on a financial services product. We think about money as a very rational thing but there is SO much emotion wrapped up in it. Like the little bundles my grandmother left us.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

I'm not sure that I have a brilliant answer here--I use it as a partner in lots of thinking and work. It helps you get the obvious ideas out of the way quickly. I am able to be SO fast in doing background research, developing target insights, and understanding the competitive landscape that I can spend my HUMAN time working on the creative pieces that push the thinking to new and more interesting places.

My mother has been sick with a complex medical condition and I've been using it a ton to understand what to expect and figure out questions to ask the doctors. But I haven't been telling the doctors that I'm doing that because I think they'll be annoyed. I had someone tell me recently that they had AI write recommendations or questions in a format that looks like a referral letter from another doctor. They then hand that to their new doctor and it gets more attention. I thought that was super interesting...how AI is giving such good information but we need to "fake" the source so people will accept it.

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