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Artificial intelligence has already made its mark on the screen. For some of the entertainment industry’s players, AI’s next playground is the real world.
Such was the focus on Thursday morning at the panel “Beyond the Screen:
How AI is the Catalyst for Next-Gen Experiences” during Variety’s Entertainment & Technology Summit presented by EY. The session’s panelists – EY Americas’ Vamsi Duvvuri, the AI leader of its Technology, Media and Entertainment and Telecommunications division; Simon Robinson, Warner Bros. Discovery’s president of Global Experiences and Studio Operations; and Shari Reich, Nvidia’s Global Head of Audio and Music Developer Relations — broke down how AI doesn’t need to remain an exclusively individual experience, but instead one that spurs communal engagements and shared experiences.
That starts with tapping into content libraries. Reich, whose work in the music industry includes stints at Sony Music and Warner Music Group, said companies can tap into their existing catalogues to help digitize and expand the use cases for things such as demos, video snippets and millions of tracks that she said they “don’t even know that literally are sitting in a warehouse.”
“You have companies sitting on crown jewels,” Reich said. “To unlock all the things that you actually own, I think is going to be the next thing to gain fan experiences. To gain new discovery — I mean, a world full of things — but the thing is, that value is just really sitting right in your backyard.”
Warner Bros. Discovery is trying to infuse some of that into its active live experiences, Robinson noted. At the company’s studio tour of its Burbank, California, lot, guests can interact with Superman’s robot aid “Gary,” a lovable presence from James Gunn’s 2025 blockbuster. Robinson said the experience in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude is currently programmed for about 15 minutes of engagement, after which the potential for repetition emerges. Moving forward, AI can help personalize how guests interact with either Gary or the Sorting Hat from the “Harry Potter” franchise, he said.
“With the use of AI, we could completely structure that to make it a highly personalized and individual experience on a guest-by-guest basis,” he said.
But the goal for the future should be bringing fans together beyond individualized experiences, the panelists said. “I always go back to the Eras Tour,” Robinson added. “10 million people didn’t buy a ticket to see Taylor Swift to have their own experience. They did it to be in a stadium with 10,000, 12,000 other people enjoying that moment. And I think that’s true throughout all of our worlds.”
In music, Reich walked through her experience with Spotify’s AI-powered DJ tool, which precedes the streaming service’s upcoming AI remix tool. While much of the conversation surrounding AI and music centers on music generation, she said, personalized tools where fans can engage with songs and then share them represent another track in an AI-powered world.
“It lives on the platform where you’re able to, [person-to-person], share remixing, and I think that that’s really cool and a really good example of personalization while also maintaining artist integrity,” she said. “You’re not going to tell them about some terrible remix somebody makes, but it’s still cool.”
Still, Duvvuri warned that those experiences have to be thoughtful, not simply using AI for AI’s sake. People should be open to how AItools can disrupt industries, but the choice to use them should be fueled by data and intentionality.
“There’s so much catalog there, but the effort to tag all the catalog and to figure out where the details are is still heavily manual,” he said. “AI can play a big role there if done properly, and it goes back to this idea of good AI requires good data. How do we collect the right data?”
The panel was moderated by Jay Tucker, the executive director for the Center for Media, Entertainment and Sports at UCLA’s Anderson School. The daylong summit is being held at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
