FEATURE AI in media is moving beyond pilots, delivering measurable impact through workflow-level transformation and operational intelligence. Microsoft’s Simon Crownshaw explains BY ALEX SMITH the hype Moving beyond The conversation around AI in media is moving fast. Debate about how the technology could deliver real value has given way to a more urgent question: who is already capturing that value, and what are they doing differently? Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft’s industry director for media and entertainment, is seeing transformation happening in real time. However, it is taking place at the level of individual workflows rather than across whole organisations. “We’ve definitely moved past the point of asking whether the transformation promised by AI is real,” he says. “In certain workflows, AI is already delivering measurable outcomes – faster highlight creation, automatic metadata enrichment, personalisation at scale. The question isn’t whether AI works. It’s whether you’re applying it to solve the right problems.” That distinction matters more than it might first appear. “The organisations seeing measurable impact are those focusing on solving very specific pain points first, rather than adopting an abstract AI strategy,” says Crownshaw. “They’re identifying what issues they need to overcome and how they can use AI to solve them, in a way that wasn’t possible before.” When media teams first encountered AI tools, the natural framing was automation: repetitive tasks completed faster and at lower cost. Crownshaw thinks that framing misses the bigger picture. The more significant shift, he suggests, is the emergence of what he calls conversational operational intelligence. This is the ability to query systems in natural language and rapidly receive answers that might previously have required a data scientist, a separate dashboard, or a phone call across departments. This condenses a process that might have taken hours into something available in seconds, as well as being available 90
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