“For the past year, the media industry has asked, ‘What is possible with AI?’” says Google Cloud’s Global Managing Director, Strategic Industries, Anil Jain. “Now the conversation has shifted from experimental pilots to production-scale execution. And as we enter the era of agentic AI, the distance between a creative spark and a finished frame is shrinking even further.”
Whereas generative AI helps people produce content, Jain said, agentic AI goes further, “reasoning through multistep processes and using specialized tools to solve complex problems, always with human oversight.”
At NAB Show, Google Cloud is discussing its holistic AI strategy and highlighting the use of its technology by companies like Adobe, Dailymotion, Globo, Fox Sports, Sphere and Paramount to remove production bottlenecks from the creative process.
For instance, Brahma AI uses Google’s AI stack to deploy and scale high-fidelity digital likenesses that help humanize data sets.
Groupe CANAL+ is applying generative media models to extract value from its archives. Using Gemini’s multimodality, it can process video, audio and text to automate asset categorization.
GETTING PERSONAL
Media companies are also using AI to personalize audience experiences, as with Major League Baseball’s new Scout Insights in the MLB Gameday app. It uses Gemini to provide AI-powered color commentary based on millions of Statcast data points.
And AI is enhancing enterprise productivity. For example, Cadent uses custom AI agents built on Gemini Enterprise to automate complex tasks, leading to an increase in campaign return on ad spend and saving thousands of hours of manual internal work.
Global Director, Telco, Media & Technology, Albert Lai said Google’s tools are used by broadcasters and studios, social networks, streamers, news publications and pay TV operations, and noted that using agentic AI at production scale in such applications requires specialized infrastructure.
He said Google Cloud provides multimodal intelligence that understands and generates text, audio and video natively. Its DeepMind research has enhanced the capabilities of Gemini, Veo, Nano Banana and Lyria. Google’s infrastructure also offers custom chips that match media workloads, all protected with enterprise-grade security.
“Media companies are integrating agentic AI into a supply chain that they themselves describe as ‘AI in the loop,’” Lai said. “It means creatives are being deliberate in their application of agentic AI into their workflows to augment human creativity and storytelling.”
In just two years, Jain said, AI has moved from experimentation and pilot projects into production and now into the realization of business value across the media supply chain.
Companies are using it to create storyboards, extract metadata, automate the logging of clapperboards, generate subtitles and dubs, turn text into animation, identify ad breaks, change aspect ratios, create multiple pieces of content for highlight reels and personalize that content.
REPLUMBING THE PIPELINE
At a time when the creator economy has exploded and a platform like TikTok can create cultural change, Jain said media companies must reshape their content pipelines to meet consumer demands.
“We believe AI is a much larger and more impactful, transformative technological shift than we’ve seen in our lifetimes. But it’s also a time of tool fragmentation, which is a nightmare for CTOs, CIOs and chief data officers,” he said.
“Our mission is to help organizations think through and implement new ways of working. You can think about us as the AI cloud now, and we’re here for the long game.”
Google Cloud is in booth W2731. It also will participate in several sessions, including one on the Main Stage (N141) Tuesday afternoon.
Jain and Google’s Márcia Mayer will discuss “The Augmented Studio: Supercharging Creativity With the Power of AI,” along with Dustin Myers, executive vice president of production operations and technology for Fox Sports.
