Artificial intelligence has moved from novelty to necessity across the media and entertainment value chain. What began as isolated experiments in metadata tagging and recommendation engines is now reshaping how content is developed, produced, localised, distributed and monetised — and how the industry thinks about cost, speed and creative capacity.

This session takes an industry-wide view of that shift. It examines where AI is delivering measurable value today: accelerating post-production and versioning workflows, scaling localisation and accessibility to markets that were previously uneconomic, enriching content understanding to drive discovery and personalisation, and bringing new precision to advertising, rights management and audience analytics. It also looks honestly at where expectations still outrun capability, and why so many promising pilots never reach production.

Beyond the technology, the session explores the structural questions the industry is now confronting: how creative and technical teams are being re-organised around AI-assisted workflows; how studios, broadcasters and streamers are balancing speed with governance, provenance and rights integrity; and what generative tools mean for talent, trust and the economics of content itself. Regulation, standards and audience expectations around synthetic media are moving quickly, and organisations that treat these as design constraints rather than afterthoughts are pulling ahead.

Attendees will leave with a grounded perspective on where the industry genuinely stands, which capabilities are maturing fastest, and the operating decisions that separate organisations scaling AI successfully from those still stuck in pilot mode.