Media and entertainment companies are quickly expanding their AI capabilities. Over the past year, adoption has accelerated across the industry, with organizations leveraging AI to optimize advertising, personalize user experiences, and streamline everything from analytics to accessibility. According to Microsoft’s latest Global AI Adoption report, enterprise usage of generative AI tools rose again in the second half of 2025.
This surge is changing how leaders plan for talent, technology, and governance in 2026. And for leaders in media and entertainment, AI is everywhere.
Let’s look at where AI adoption and use is prevalent in the media and entertainment industry across streaming, film and television, broadcast media, and physical entertainment—and how leaders can look ahead to what’s next.
Where AI Is Being Used in Media & Entertainment Today
Advertising & Marketing
AI is transforming how media companies plan, place, and measure advertising. Advanced algorithms are now driving media planning, audience creation, forecasting, and marketing mix modeling. However, only about 30% of media organizations have fully integrated AI across the campaign lifecycle, with half of the remaining companies aiming to close that gap by 2026—a clear window for competitive advantage through better data and model governance.
In media advertising, AI is primarily used for:
- Optimizing ad placement
- Measuring ad effectiveness
- Maximizing ad revenue
- Personalizing ads based on location
- Delivering relevant ads based on viewing history
Organizations can use the data gained through these insights to increase audience engagement and create more effective marketing campaigns.
Data Analytics
Media organizations are shifting from retrospective reporting to real-time analytics, using AI to unlock deeper consumer and audience insights. Executives expect profitability improvements from smarter workflows and connected data, but many still face challenges with fragmented stacks and content ROI pressure. The focus is shifting toward funding data quality, identity, and experimentation pipelines rather than simply adding new tools.
Entertainment companies are using AI to provide audiences with live data and performance metrics, primarily in sports broadcasting. This allows them to maximize fan participation and deliver more engaging experiences in line with what fans want to see. While using AI to analyze how audiences interact with live data, companies are also using AI to support streaming reliability and platform bandwidth for viewership.
Personalization & User Experience
Personalization is one of the most desired applications of AI in media today. Responsive recommendations and personalized user interfaces (UI) are now standard expectations for audiences. Following its 2025 UI update, Netflix has shown that personalized recommendations drive significant engagement lifts.
With so many streaming and media platforms available to audiences, personalization is key to staying competitive and boosting audience enjoyment. Localization technology also allows platforms to promote content in specific regions to increase global reach. This strategy is especially effective with foreign language media.
READ NEXT: How AI Personalization Is Driving Engagement and Monetization in Media
Accessibility
One area where AI shines in media is through its expansion into creating more accessibility in film, television, and live-streaming. AI is rapidly expanding accessibility for audiences with hearing, visual, or language barriers. Automated subtitles and captions, both live and prerecorded, are now supported by AI-assisted pipelines. Human-in-the-loop workflows are emerging as best practice, ensuring that captions and audio descriptions meet industry standards.
AI also powers translation and personalized audio descriptions, reducing manual effort while maintaining as much of the original intent and emotion as possible. For global releases, editorial review should remain a standard practice to preserve both nuance and compliance.
Experiential Media
Theme parks and live venues are at the forefront of AI-powered robotics, blending storytelling with real-time interaction. Disney, NVIDIA, and Google DeepMind’s collaboration on the Newton physics and robotics engine is powering next-generation entertainment robots—such as Disney’s Star Wars BDX droids and Disneyland Paris’s new interactive Olaf that rely on AI-based reinforcement learning—set for deployment in parks. These advancements illustrate how AI and robotics are personalizing guest engagement and creating new forms of immersive entertainment.
Operationally, parks are using AI to monitor queues in real time, improving wait times and guest satisfaction. AI-assisted content and on-device guidance are also enhancing guest experience during long waits by allowing guests to interact further with rides from their smartphones while still in the queue.
AI Governance in Media
As AI in media continues to accelerate, governance is as important as innovation. The rise of AI-powered deepfakes and scams is keeping content and intellectual property (IP) protection top of mind at most companies. From ongoing entertainment lawsuits over potential financial losses to strikes and negotiations by Hollywood writers and actors, human involvement and robust cybersecurity remain high priorities for leaders and employees.
Conversations centered around the future of AI-generated content across platforms, IP protection, and rights ownership will likely continue to happen as AI capabilities expand and reach new heights. To safeguard platforms and IP while driving innovation, onboarding the right talent is essential to staying technologically compliant and ahead.
How Media Companies Can Scale AI
The challenge for 2026 is how to scale AI responsibly and effectively. Media organizations need:
- AI engineers, MLOps engineers, and data scientists who can design, build, and maintain robust AI systems.
- AI product leaders and platform engineers to operationalize AI across teams and business lines.
- Analytics specialists who understand IP, privacy, and compliance in media contexts.
- Professional services partners to help design scalable AI architectures and operationalize personalization, ad optimization, and accessibility workflows with human-in-the-loop review.
READ NEXT: Talent Is the Competitive Advantage as Entertainment Turns Tech
Navigate AI With Insight Global
From ad optimization and real-time analytics to personalization, accessibility, robotics, and governance, AI is reshaping how content is created, distributed, and experienced. By onboarding the right talent, you can bridge strategy, engineering, analytics, and governance, helping media leaders move from proofs-of-concept to reliable, secure, and measurable production systems.
Insight Global goes beyond staffing to help entertainment teams move faster, build confidently, and adapt to new technology as AI in media continues to evolve. Our professional services experts have deep expertise in AI, data, product and platform engineering, and content security, making us a trusted partner for organizations navigating the next wave of transformation.
If you’re ready to accelerate your AI capabilities, explore how Insight Global can support your next step today.
