At IBC2026, show me what your AI tech changes
I love IBC. I've been going for more years than I probably care to admit, and I still get excited walking into the RAI and seeing what people have built. For all the conversations about meetings, networking, and sore feet, it remains one of the few places where you can get a genuine sense of where the media industry is heading. And, if I'm honest, I'm still enough of a technology geek to enjoy seeing something new working for the first time. But this year I'm going to try asking a slightly different question. Not, "What does it do?" but, "What does it change?"
That might sound like semantics, but I think the distinction matters. We are entering another period where extraordinary technological capability is arriving very quickly. AI will inevitably be everywhere at IBC this year, alongside cloud, automation, personalisation, new production tools, and increasingly software-defined workflows. The demonstrations will be impressive. They should be. But demonstrating that something can be done is only the beginning. The more interesting question is what happens because it can be done.
Confusing efficiency with innovation
Don't show me that AI can automatically create hundreds of clips from a football match. Show me that those clips help a fan discover a player, team, or competition they didn't previously care about. Don't just show me that a workflow can be automated. Show me what the producer, editor or journalist does with the time you've given back to them. Don't show me another personalised experience because personalisation is technically possible. Show me why the experience is genuinely better for the person receiving it. Capability is interesting. Consequence is where the value lives.
I think this is particularly important in sport because we sometimes confuse efficiency with innovation. There is enormous value in making production faster, cheaper, and more efficient. If we can produce the same quality for 30 percent less, that matters. If technology removes repetitive work, reduces travel, or allows teams to do more with the same resources, that's progress. But efficiency and innovation aren't always the same thing. The question that really interests me is: what can we now do that we couldn't do before?
That's where things become exciting. Perhaps technology makes it economically viable to produce a competition that previously couldn't justify a traditional broadcast. Perhaps automated localisation means a smaller sport can suddenly reach fans in ten languages rather than one. Perhaps accessibility stops being a separate workflow and becomes inherent in every piece of content. Perhaps a production team can put a camera somewhere it could never previously go, or tell the story from the perspective of an athlete, coach or fan in a way that wasn't practical before. Those aren't simply improvements to an existing process. They create new possibilities.
I've seen this distinction repeatedly throughout my career. The projects that stay with me are rarely the ones where we achieved the most impressive technical specification. They're the ones where somebody on the creative or production side suddenly realised they could do something differently. That's the moment technology becomes interesting to me. When the conversation changes from, "Look what we've built," to, "Imagine what we could do with this." The first is a technology demonstration. The second is the beginning of innovation.
Advancing AI from substitution to augmentation
It also changes how we should think about AI. There is a perfectly understandable focus right now on what AI can automate, and there will be plenty of that on the show floor. But I hope the conversation at IBC moves beyond replacing tasks. The bigger opportunity is what happens when we give talented people new capabilities. What can a director create with tools they didn't have before? What stories can a journalist find when machines can process information at a scale no human ever could? What happens when a small production suddenly has access to capabilities that were previously available only to the biggest broadcasters? For me, augmentation is much more interesting than substitution.
And none of this means every innovation needs to change the world. Sometimes doing something significantly cheaper or simpler is exactly the breakthrough an industry needs. But we should be clear about the outcome. Technology should solve a problem, remove friction, create an opportunity, or improve an experience. Adding AI to an existing product doesn't automatically make it innovative, any more than moving something to the cloud automatically transformed it a decade ago. The label matters far less than what changes for the person actually using it.
So when I walk around IBC this year, I'll still want to see the technology. I'll still ask how it works, how it scales, and what sits underneath it. I'll undoubtedly find things that make me stop in a hall when I'm already late for my next meeting. That's part of what makes IBC brilliant. But there's one question I suspect I'll ask more than any other: what changes because this exists? If the answer is that a fan gets a better experience, a storyteller gets more creative freedom, a sport reaches an audience it couldn't reach before or something previously impossible becomes possible, you've probably got my attention. If the answer is simply that it does the same thing with AI in the name, you might have a harder job.
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