Published to clients: May 29, 2025 ID: 2076
Published to Readers: May 30, 2025
Published to Email Whispers: July 7, 2025
Video edition: July 7, 2025
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Abstract
AI is transforming media and entertainment, reshaping workflows and automating the tedious. This shift isn’t new—it’s an evolution already well underway. While concerns about disruption persist, AI is proving to be a powerful tool that enhances efficiency, making content more accessible and refining quality. From metadata enrichment to streamlined production, AI empowers professionals by eliminating the mundane and allowing more focus on creativity. Rather than replacing jobs, it shifts how work gets done, seamlessly integrating with existing processes to unlock new possibilities in storytelling, production, and distribution. The industry is adapting, and AI is at the heart of that transformation.
Target Audience Titles:
Chief Technology Officer, Chief Supply Chain Officer, Chief Digital Officer
Chief Data Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Content Officer
Head of AI and Machine Learning, Data Scientists
Product Managers, Content Managers, Sound Engineers, Distribution Engineers
Production Technologists, Streaming Platform Developers
Chief Technology Officer, Chief Supply Chain Officer, Chief Digital Officer
Key Takeaways
- AI is transforming workflows, automating the tedious, and reshaping media and entertainment.
- Efficiency gains let creators focus on storytelling while AI enhances accessibility and searchability.
- AI isn’t replacing jobs—it’s evolving how work gets done, integrating seamlessly into production processes.
How can AI and machine learning transform media and entertainment?
We took the most frequently asked and most urgent technology questions straight to the Technology experts gathering at NAB Show 2025. This Whisper Report addresses the question regarding how can AI and machine learning transform media and entertainment?
Setting the Stage
As DeepDub’s Oz Krakowski stated, “We see is a lot of the work that was done before is now done in different.” These changes have already hit the headlines for as Dell Technologies’ Tom Burns pointed out, “Everybody’s all concerned with Gen AI but of course the writers and actors strikes were all about that.” Thus this AI transformation is not new but rather is currently underway. Latakoo’s Jade Kurian offered this perspective. “The question now is how do we do this thoughtfully? How do we do it in a way that we don’t compromise ethics – where we don’t compromise people’s jobs? How do we make it flow back and forth where we take advantage of AI and machine learning to make our lives easier, make our lives better, and make entertainment and media better.” Cinnafilm’s Dom Jackson suggests we take another step back to gain a larger perspective, “There’s a lot of fear around AI and those technologies and in that sense, I see those as part of a continuum of ongoing automation processes that have been going on since the industrial revolution. Everyone’s always scared when something new comes along and then very quickly it becomes normal and it empowers us to work in new and different and usually more efficient ways.” See Figure 1 for the Cornucopia of AI use cases suggested. Let’s explore some of those new, and different, more efficient ways.
AI Use Cases in Media
One thing is for certain, there is no shortage of opportunity for AI to positively impact the media and entertainment sector. The favorite use case among all users, as Strada’s Michael Cioni put it, “AI is best for our industry as a utility form to do the mundane tasks .. we need AI that automates mundane tasks like color correcting sound noise reduction, video audio noise reduction, face tagging, locations, objects, emotions – those are all the things that no one wants to sit and log footage. AI can log it for us.” Or per Ross’s David Green, “AI is going to make us more efficient and more effective and let us focus on what we love doing which is creating amazing content.” No matter which perspective you prefer – the elimination of the mundane or the freeing up to do the fun parts – AI is here to stay in media workflows. As Dell’s Tom Burns observed, “Machine learning has already transformed media and entertainment in so many invisible ways from security to fixing single pixel defects to all kinds of low-level network functions and automated provisioning.”
When it comes to all that stored media, there are plenty of suggestions of how AI can assist as well. Per SNS’s Alex Hlavaty, “It actually can be an incredibly helpful buddy to sort through the stuff we don’t want to do parse through petabytes worth of information. Help us find assets more quickly and just interact with our data in a much more meaningful way while reducing man hours doing things that are laborious.” . Eon Media’s Greg Morrow observed, “our customers have large libraries of video files that only have a file name or have just a a small title. We really enriched those assets with information to make those assets more usable by identifying people places things emotional sentiment um ethnicity as part of those assets.” Dell Technologies’ Tom Burns denoted, “One of the GEN AI things that is proving to be useful is for companies that have large archives or studios that have that have the rights holders to a lot of content, using AI to extend the metadata and inform them of what they actually have in their archive allows them to make that more searchable and therefore more monetizable on.” Increasing metadata for the purpose of search and the related business cases that come from having truly searchable content is a common theme. As Axle.ai’s Sam Bogoch simply stated, if, “they can’t find it they can’t reuse it.”
In some of the use cases such as sound editing, it has completely transformed the task at hand. As DeepDub’s Oz Krakowski observed, “just like you cannot imagine a graphics designer not using Photoshop it’s unheard of right however 20 years ago this was extremely questionable nowadays thinking of doing voice design and editing dialogues without using AI.” Ross’s David Green offers additional suggestions, “things like camera tracking so instead of having to every single second manually figure out where things are and do manual keying you know markers and those sort of things we can use AI to automatically be able to do those things .. instead of having to flip through a manual.” Dell’s Tom Burns observed, “when you render your VFX AI upsampling has gotten so good now that you can render at 2K and up to 4K and it looks better than if you rendered at 4K in the first place.” Wow! Upsampling rendering better than if it was 4k in the first place – now that is an improvement – by definition. Localization is another area that has been drastically impacted by AI. Today, with AI tools such as Yella Umbrella are, “making content accessible to users that wouldn’t have access to it normally either because there’s no one to localize that content or just because the content that they want to access is not available in the accessibility form that they prefer.” If the form you prefer isn’t about language but more about duration, Magnify’s Ken Ruck shares today one can, “edit automatically (and) create clips automatically.” Clients may recall our coverage of Conference Whispers: NAB Show 2023 when automated shorts were first highlighted.
One of the most treasured advancements is that of workflow automation. As Eon Media’s Greg Morrow stated, “workflow automation to improve the efficiency of a media organization in order for the people in the organization to create higher value content and less of the drudgery work.” In other words, AI can transform Media and Entertainment by enabling all to do more with less. But if you are worried about your job, Cinnafilm’s Dom Jackson assured, “strangely ultimately people always end up having jobs they’re different jobs but people always end up with plenty of work.”
Related playlists
- Whisper Report: How can AI and machine learning transform media and entertainment?
- Conference Whispers: NAB Show 2025
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