NAB Show Perspectives: How agentic AI can help broadcasters create new value

As the broadcast industry gathers for the NAB Show, the conversation often centers on the tension between legacy workflows and new technologies. The industry’s linear, top-down model of content creation — where a script is green-lit, a mood board approved, and a video produced — are ripe for improvement in this day and age. In an era of fractured audiences and high production costs, the limitations of this model have contributed to a creative landscape that many feel is in decline.

The high cost of creative stagnation

A challenging thesis suggests the industry’s creative output has become profoundly risk-averse. With the high financial stakes of modern productions, originality is often sacrificed for a proven formula. The issue is not a lack of talent, but a model that makes experimentation prohibitively expensive.

While AI has been presented as a solution, its adoption has been chaotic. Creative teams move between disparate, siloed tools and manually stitch the outputs together. This inefficiency highlights a deeper issue: even with powerful tools, the fundamental workflow remains unchanged. The disconnect exists between the customer and their own operational transformation.

The case for forward-deployed creatives

This issue reflects a broader challenge with enterprise AI maturity. Consider Zach Math of Lonely Animals, a director whose campaigns for brands like Kraft and the NFL become part of the cultural conversation. As an early adopter of generative AI, he used it to accelerate his existing process rather than to rethink it entirely. Because he was occupied with established methods, he couldn’t fully explore new, more efficient workflows, and there was no expert in the room to guide him.

“It’s always about choosing the best tool for each moment to serve the idea and the story. You don’t want great ideas to die on the vine because of time or budget constraints. New tools can be incredible, but there is often a learning curve, and the technology is constantly changing,” Zach said. “Having expert partners along the way is extremely valuable so you can spend more time on the creative process. At the end of the day, everyone just wants to build a great team and create good work.”

Generative AI requires a different mindset, not just an accelerated workflow. An MIT CISR briefing on enterprise AI maturity noted that the most significant financial impact comes when organizations embed AI into their core operations. The key challenge is synchronization: redesigning work and reskilling people.

This need has given rise to the role of the Forward Deployed Creative (FDC). An FDC is an embedded creative technologist who works within a client’s team to shift their operations from merely having an AI tool to making AI central to how they work. This approach provides deep enterprise integration. A team’s transformation is cemented during the production process, such as on the fourteenth iteration of a difficult shot, when a creative director realizes the new capability is repeatable and scalable. An expert FDC needs to be present for that realization.

Remixing the past for a social future

The most immediate application of this expert-led model involves the vast content archives held by major broadcasters. Media companies understand their decades of photos, articles, and videos are valuable, but they often lack a clear process to adapt this material for the fast-paced social media landscape.

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An AI creative partner, guided by an FDC, is the solution. An archive becomes a dynamic source for new content. An FDC can show a team how to use AI to take a historic interview and generate a series of animated clips for Instagram, or transform still photos from a 1970s concert into a video for TikTok. This process augments human creativity, freeing up teams to focus on higher-level strategy and vision by offloading tedious tasks.

Democratizing creativity, powered by people

The combination of AI tools and embedded experts is already changing how creative teams operate, allowing smaller groups to create and scale high-quality content with unprecedented speed. The traditional constraints of budget and time are becoming less formidable.

“This model augments the artist’s capabilities, offering a release from the constraints that kill great ideas. Creatives can now redirect their efforts from tedious, manual tasks to genuine experimentation,” said creative Kyt Janae. “This freedom makes it possible to reimagine a decades-old archive for a new generation, test bold concepts without the usual budget fears, and focus energy on the essential work of bringing visionary stories to life.”

This shift allows the industry to embrace novelty again. With lower barriers to experimentation, creatives have more freedom to take risks. A studio could explore a hundred different ideas instead of ten, and a broadcaster can A/B test a dozen promotional spots in an afternoon.

The conversation at NAB should focus on this new philosophy of creation. The enterprises that capture real value from AI will be those that master the human element of organizational change. This requires a partner to guide the process of evolving content for modern audiences, a path that will enable the broadcast industry to thrive.

Prince Boucher, LumaPrince Boucher is GTM lead for Luma.