148 FEATURE Across the media industry, the conversation around AI has shifted rapidly from curiosity to urgency. Executives are no longer asking whether AI will matter, but how quickly it will reshape everything from production pipelines to audience engagement. With new possibilities emerging rapidly, the excitement is accompanied by significant concerns, as organisations grapple with the challenge of making the most of this transformative technology when the foundations they rely upon were designed for a different era. “The surge in AI use cases is a double-edged sword for media organisations,” says Jimmy ParkerBarratt, worldwide media and entertainment strategy director at Microsoft. “On one hand, it unlocks extraordinary creative and operational potential. On the other, it exposes the limitations of legacy data architectures that were never designed to support the scale, speed, complexity and security considerations of modern AI workloads.” The key issue, according to Parker-Barratt, is that many media companies are still operating in fragmented environments, with separate data silos in production, distribution and monetisation workflows. This has a serious impact, both on operations and the effective training of AI models. “AI thrives on clean, unified and well-governed data,” says Parker-Barratt. “Without that foundation, organisations risk building brittle solutions that don’t scale or generalise well. At Microsoft, we often say: ‘AI is only as good as the data it learns from.’ That’s especially true in media, Microsoft’s Jimmy Parker-Barratt explains why the extraordinary potential of AI can only be unlocked with a dramatic rethinking of data strategy across the media industry BY ALEX SMITH
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=