NAB Show Perspectives: AI is not about volume, it’s about value

For the better part of a decade, the conversation in media and entertainment has centered on one word: more. More content. More channels. More formats. More speed. AI accelerated that trajectory — lowering production costs, simplifying workflows, and shifting expectations from producing consistently to producing constantly.

That reality is already here. And it’s not slowing down.

According to Iconik’s 2026 Media Stats Report, customers managed nearly 903 million assets across 324 petabytes of data in 2025 — a 54% and 56% increase year over year. Teams are adding close to 900,000 new assets every day. Scale is no longer theoretical.

But the conversation hasn’t caught up.

Volume is no longer a differentiator

When every organization can produce at scale, volume stops being a competitive advantage. It becomes background noise. The real differentiator is what happens after content is created — whether it can be found, trusted, used, and repurposed across contexts.

Increasingly, it’s also about whether that content can be adapted. Not just stored, but activated — reshaped for different audiences, platforms, and moments in ways that extend its value.

This is where the industry is beginning to recalibrate. There’s growing recognition that AI’s near-term value isn’t just in generating content, but in the infrastructure around it: the systems that make content usable, governable, and actionable.

That shift is necessary. But on its own, it’s not enough.

Advertisement

Infrastructure is the foundation — not the ceiling

Strong infrastructure changes how content is managed. But paired with AI and human judgment, it changes what content can become.

A single piece of content is no longer a fixed output. It becomes a source — something that can be transformed into many versions, each tailored to a specific audience, market, or context.

That’s not replacement. It’s amplification — and it’s where the real opportunity still sits.

The human in the loop is not a constraint in this model. It’s what ensures that scale does not come at the expense of meaning. Judgment, context, and creative intent are what turn volume into relevance. Without that, more content simply becomes more noise.

Where organizations are falling behind

This isn’t a creativity gap. It’s an operational one.

Many teams are still managing content with infrastructure designed for a different era — one where assets were fewer, workflows were linear, and speed was measured in days, not minutes. In that environment, media libraries became passive archives instead of active systems. Assets were recreated because they couldn’t be found. Rights windows were missed. Teams spent more time searching than creating.

At scale, these inefficiencies don’t stay contained. They compound.

Poor metadata that is manageable at ten thousand assets becomes a liability at one hundred million. Manual workflows break under the pressure of continuous publishing. And over time, these constraints begin to degrade creative output itself, limiting what teams can realistically execute.

What operationally mature teams do differently

The organizations pulling ahead have made a deliberate shift: They treat creative operations as a strategic function, not an administrative one.

They invest in metadata governance early, understanding that AI-driven discovery only works when assets are structured and trustworthy. They use automation to handle repeatable work — tagging, transcription, categorization — so that human effort is focused on decisions that require judgment.

The data reflects this. In 2025, more than half of metadata jobs across Iconik were automated, alongside millions of workflow and AI-powered processes supporting discovery and reuse. These teams are not necessarily larger. They are more disciplined about the systems that enable speed, control, and consistency.

The real ROI question

Return on content isn’t just about production efficiency. It’s about control.

Advertisement

Do you know what you have, where it lives, and who can use it? Can you find it quickly? Can you trust it? And increasingly, can you adapt it at scale without losing context or quality?

Organizations that can answer yes extract more value from every asset. They move faster, reuse more, and avoid the hidden costs of lost archives and duplicated work.

The shift that matters now

The next phase of this industry won’t be defined by generation alone. It will be defined by what happens after content is created — how it is organized, governed, activated, and ultimately amplified.

The ability to produce more is now table stakes. The ability to make that content work continuously — across formats, audiences, and moments — is what will separate leaders from the rest.

We are still early in that shift. The market is starting to ask a better question: not how to create more content, but how to make it more valuable over time.

That’s where the next phase of this industry will be defined.

Kathleen Barrett, BacklightKathleen Barrett is CEO of Backlight, the parent company of Iconik and Wildmoka. The Backlight team can be found at NAB at North Hall, Booth #N2829. Backlight's 2026 Iconik Media Stats Report is available at iconik.io.