[This article is part of a series where I invited media industry leaders to share their thoughts on 2025 and what it means for the future. Boris Yamnitsky is the CEO/Co-founder of BorisFX. Website: BorisFX.com. ]
Some call 2025 a transformative year for the Media and Entertainment industry, but I’d argue it started in 2024, two years ago, with the rapid, world-wide adoption of the first published model of ChatGPT. It took the world by storm and we never looked back. AI may be more momentous and transformative for mankind than the industrial revolution of the 18th century or internet in 2000. But in 2025 it made the first real impact on the M&E space. It first started with rejection and resentment. “AI can’t replace artists”, “AI can’t create real content”, “AI is not good enough for professional work” and then heads slowly started to turn. Now I hear from our customers, large and small: “We are interested, we are curious”, “We are OK with generative AI”, “We are adopting some AI tools now”. 2025 is the first year when it started to happen.
If 2024 was the year of the strikes, the 2025 is the year of layoffs and consolidations. M&E industry is changing in profound ways in many aspects of production, post-production and delivery. We may feel nostalgic about big theatrical releases of the past, but we are growing faster with streaming, social media, and gaming. Despite shifts in the labor market and buyouts/consolidations, most vendors making products for the production and post-production space grew nicely in 2025.
What to expect in 2026? AI will continue to redefine the way we work. It will affect learning new skills by making information even more available and its consumption more entertaining than a Google search. Instead of Googling how to do something and following the links to pages and articles, using an LLM model such as ChatGPT is engaging you in a meaningful dialog explaining what it knows (and its knowledge will expand by the day). It will translate into languages, provide summaries and recaps and overall act as a capable personal assistant.
AI will organize your work, sorting video and audio content, make it better quality (image and audio restoration), suggest sequence of events and shots, select important moments which you can further trim and fine-tune to your taste, obey plain-text written and spoken commands replacing tedious menus and buttons – the software UI as we know it is about to change. In other words, the work of media post-production will become less tedious and more creative, leaving you more time to dream and try new ideas. It will find unwanted objects and sounds and seamlessly replace them. It will check your work for technical quality and usability. It will act as a spellchecker for the media content.
AI will accelerate the very development of media post-production tools by assisting programmers to write code faster and better. Documenting and debugging code, porting it to new platforms and exploiting new APIs – coding LLMs such as Claude Code are good at all these tasks, it is a capable pair programmer. It does not replace software architects, but it has the potential to speed up the software development process. In 2026 expect more frequent and more impressive software updates from your favorite software developer.
What should we do to embrace the AI revolution of 2026? As developers and toolmakers, we should exploit every latest technology and apply it to our products. The AI world is moving very fast and it’s a challenge to keep up with it. As media creators, we should approach AI with an open mind. Focus on what is good and not on what is bad.
AI is inevitable and its progress is irreversible. We better embrace it!
