Media at the speed of ideas: The rise of the agentic production environment

The media industry runs on stories — from the creators who dream them to the audiences they inspire. But the biggest barrier to innovation has rarely been lack of imagination. It’s the manual work required to bring those ideas to life.

For the past year, the media industry asked, "What is possible with AI?" Now, as we head into NAB Show 2026, the conversation has shifted from experimental pilots to production-scale execution. And as we enter the era of agentic AI, the distance between a creative spark and a finished frame is shrinking even further. At Google Cloud, we provide the agentic platform and tools that allow studios to move at the pace of thought, so creative teams spend less time on operational tasks and more time on the work itself.

From generative to agentic: The new creative frontier

Generative AI helps creatives produce content. Agentic AI goes further, reasoning through multi-step goals and using specialized tools to solve complex problems, always with human oversight.

Imagine an agent that doesn't just search your archive of content, but proactively monitors to suggest an edit based on emotional resonance in a football game — or an agent that autonomously manages global localization and rights compliance in seconds.

Steps to orchestrating the media lifecycle

To turn the promise of agentic AI into tangible business value, we help creative teams focus on four core areas where AI can remove production bottlenecks from the creative process.

Enhancing content production: Moving production to the cloud removes physical boundaries, helping creative teams collaborate from anywhere in the world, on the same project, at the same time.

• Avid, a cornerstone of media workflow solutions, announced it is integrating our AI, including our advanced AI models like Gemini and Veo, into two products: Media Composer and the new cloud-native Content Core platform. This collaboration enables agentic workflows, where editors can automate complex creative tasks, such as video generation and intelligent metadata search, transforming manual production workflows into collaborative, AI-driven experiences.

• Brahma AI, an enterprise AI content platform, is powering high-fidelity digital likenesses across retail, entertainment, and healthcare, making them interactive and intelligence-driven within a secure and governed framework.

Unlocking content value through data and AI: Media organizations sit on decades of archived footage that is difficult to search through and expensive to manage. AI can automatically tag every scene and shot, making massive video libraries as searchable as the web. This helps teams find and reuse content in seconds, opening up new ways to monetize archives through hyper-local streaming and more relevant viewer experiences.

• Groupe CANAL+, a global media and entertainment group, is using our generative media models to unlock the full potential of its international archives. By using Gemini’s multimodality, CANAL+ is able to process video, audio, and text to automate in-depth asset categorization. They are also providing their production partners and creative teams with Veo to generate scenes impossible to produce using traditional methods.

Personalizing audience experiences: Media companies are increasingly using AI to deliver hyper-relevant content that keeps fans and viewers engaged for longer, and fosters deep viewer loyalty.

• Quickplay announced the full-scale deployment of Gray Media's next-generation streaming platform, powered by Google Cloud’s AI, now live across all of Gray’s 113 television markets. The integration allows Gray to manage 1,300 digital touchpoints with real-time viewer intelligence, delivering hyper-local news and entertainment to 37% of U.S. TV households.

• Major League Baseball (MLB) debuted Scout Insights this season in the MLB Gameday app. The new feature uses Gemini to provide real-time, AI-powered color commentary. It scans millions of Statcast data points to deliver situational context that used to live only in the broadcast booth — like the full history between a specific pitcher and batter.

• NBCUniversal and Google Cloud debuted a new "athlete-to-fan" watching experience at the Milan Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games, where the same AI tool for athlete training was used to help viewers understand the technical nuances of select competitions.

Enhancing enterprise productivity: Companies are also deploying AI agents to speed up developer workflows and improve customer service operations. Using Gemini Enterprise, teams can discover, create, and run AI agents that perform tasks across 100+ native application connectors, making internal information faster to find and production decisions easier to make.

• Cadent is using custom AI agents built on Gemini Enterprise to transform its operational efficiency. By deploying these agents to automate complex internal tasks, Cadent saw a 35% increase in campaign Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) across their campaigns and saved 3,000 employee hours on internal manual tasks.

The foundation: What makes this work at scale

Agentic AI at production scale requires infrastructure built for the media industry’s specific security and performance needs. Here’s what Google Cloud provides:

• Multimodal intelligence: Gemini understands text, audio, and video natively.

• Generative media models: We bring Google DeepMind’s research directly to Vertex AI, including our portfolio of leading models like Gemini, Veo, Nano Banana and Lyria, with built-in SynthID watermarking.

• Infrastructure built for AI: From TPUs to the latest G4 instances, media companies can choose the custom chips that match their workloads, whether that’s for live sports or breaking news.

• Enterprise-grade security: We protect media companies’ most valuable assets with Media & Entertainment security protocols and compliance with Trusted Partner Network (TPN) guidelines. We offer data sovereignty and default encryption too, so companies can innovate without compromising their IP.

Join us at NAB Show 2026

Visit the Google Cloud Booth (West Hall, #W2731) from April 19–22. We’ll have live demos and sessions, including at the NAB Sports Summit, showing how Google Cloud helps media teams turn generative AI into tangible business value.