Avid makes the case that the most valuable AI in a newsroom stays in the background

The artificial intelligence conversation at the 2026 NAB Show moved on from the question of whether to adopt AI to the harder question of how.

“People are looking for the practical benefits of introducing AI into any kind of workflow,” said Craig Wilson, senior director of product management at Avid. “It’s gone far beyond just going to throw some AI at it and see what it takes.”

That shift in customer expectations has shaped Avid’s strategy this year. The company’s headline announcement, a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud, embeds Google’s Gemini models and the Vertex AI platform directly into Media Composer, Avid’s video editing suite, and into Avid Content Core, the company’s cloud-native media data layer that reached general availability this week.

The integration addresses a problem Wilson said customers have described for years: as the volume of incoming media grows, finding a specific piece of footage, what one customer called the “critical picture,” becomes harder and slower.

“They want their reporters to find the critical picture faster,” Wilson said.

The partnership uses Google’s Vision Warehouse technology to enable what Wilson described as semantic and image-based search, allowing users to query a media library using natural language rather than file names or manually entered metadata. In a demo at the show, Wilson said searches returned results even when a subject’s name appeared nowhere in the file metadata, only in the visual analysis layer generated by the AI.

“People want to search based on what their experience of search is,” he said. “I bring up Google and I do a search. I don’t necessarily type in specific bits of metadata.”

The partnership also adds a Gemini-powered multimodal extension to Media Composer, designed to handle metadata enhancement, automated logging and B-roll generation. Avid has also announced a parallel integration with Amazon Web Services, with Content Core’s core infrastructure built on AWS while the search layer draws on Google Cloud. Wilson described this as a deliberate architecture choice reflecting the relative strengths of each platform.

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“Content Core is built on an AWS platform, so the brain exists there, but the search is going to come from Google,” he said. “We want to be cloud agnostic to an extent.”

AI as assistant, not editor

Wilson was consistent on one point: AI in Avid’s tools is positioned as an assistant, not a decision-maker. The editorial choices, such as what goes on the timeline and what story gets told, remain with the journalist or editor.

“It’s still the end user that’s making the ultimate choice of what shot goes in the timeline,” he said. “As opposed to the AI making those key editorial decisions.”

That framing reflects a broader stance among established vendors at NAB this year, as the industry moves away from broad promises about automation and toward narrower, deployable use cases. Wilson pointed to transcription, translation and summarization as the AI features most widely deployed among Avid customers today.

The consolidation problem

Wilson acknowledged that the customer base for broadcast technology is contracting. As media companies merge and newsroom staffs shrink, he said the pressure on remaining journalists to produce more, across more platforms, is increasing.

“The journalists who are there at the moment are going to be expected to deliver more,” he said, citing both within-group content sharing and multi-platform publishing as areas where AI tools are being applied to extend what smaller teams can produce.

Program streams might share content, with only a portion being locally distinct.

“People still need the technology. They still need the ability to share,” he said. “The requirement to share more seamlessly between newsrooms because of those consolidations becomes more important, because there’s not going to be the same number of people to create the number of stories.”

The cloud question, and why some customers are pulling back

On cloud strategy, Wilson offered a more measured view than the announcements might suggest. He said the majority of Avid’s MediaCentral customers remain on-premises, whether on physical hardware or virtualized infrastructure. Some European customers have moved to private data centers.

Cloud adoption, he said, has been tactical rather than wholesale.

“What are the workflows that actually make sense in the cloud?” he said, recalling how the industry overreached in its early enthusiasm. “There was a reckoning.”

He noted an ongoing conversation in the industry about media repatriation, bringing content and workflows back from public cloud environments, driven in part by egress costs, though he said it has not directly affected Avid’s business in a significant way. Data sovereignty also comes up in international discussions, he said.

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“What is going to be stored in the cloud, where is my media going to actually live,” and what happens if cloud access is interrupted, are questions customers are still working through. For live broadcast operations in particular, those concerns carry real operational weight.

“The closer you get to live, the more you want to be able to wrap your arms around the things that you’ve got,” he said. “The six o’clock show is going to happen at six o’clock.”

He also pointed to a talent gap as a factor slowing cloud migration. Broadcast engineers with deep cloud expertise are in short supply, and broadcasters are now competing for that talent against companies in other sectors that can pay considerably more.

“If you’re now looking for a cloud-based engineer, you’re competing against virtually everybody,” Wilson said.

News tools and a new NRCS

Beyond the Google announcement, Avid highlighted the next generation of its newsroom computer system. Rundown, a cloud-native, browser-based NRCS built on the Wolftech platform, made its public debut at the show. Wilson described the news product line as an area of renewed focus for the company.

The Avid for News suite also integrates with existing tools and infrastructure, allowing organizations to evolve without replacing systems wholesale.

Wilson framed that approach, which Avid is calling “modernizing without disruption,” as a response to customer concerns about the investment already made in both technology and trained staff.

“There’s lots and lots of institutional knowledge that exists,” he said. “People are looking for how do we move forward and take advantage of cloud hosted services, but don’t just throw away everything we’ve had for the past 10 to 15 years.”

Wilson noted that Media Composer now has approximately 60 partner extensions available through its SDK, with several hundred more in development. He positioned this openness, alongside Avid’s ownership of connected products across ingest, editing, storage and newsroom systems, as a distinguishing factor against competitors who offer point solutions in single categories.

“Our secret sauce is the fact that we have all of these pieces,” he said.

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