2025: The Year AI Transforms the Media Industry

January 8, 2025 - This insightful piece was written by Sam Bogoch, CEO of Axle AI, offering his expert perspective on the transformative trends shaping the media industry in 2025.

2025 is going to be an amazing year for the media industry, for both good and bad reasons. But the basic reason can be summed up in 2 letters: AI. I wish I could say that when we launched Axle AI in 2018, we foresaw this rate of change and investment in the space – but in fact, we were thinking of something a lot more incremental, with progress measured in years. We're certainly benefitting, as Axle AI had a record year in 2024, and 2025 is shaping up for even faster growth in adoption of AI-powered search and repurposing across broadcast, corporate and sport segments. A key element of our growth is that customers are looking for AI, like ours, that they can control and run on premise, without fear that their IP will be 'scraped' and reused by hyperscalers.

At this point, with the amount of global investment in generative AI and multimodal large language models (LLMs), the pace is measured in days and sometimes in hours, as competing products cascade one after the other. There isn't even time to develop in-depth expertise in a given toolset, before another superior toolset is launched. As a result, 2025 will be the year that frameworks and tools are developed to help manage this unprecedented rate of change.

For the time being – yes, this could start to change – the end users of this technology will mostly be humans. And it takes humans time to learn and adopt new tools, especially in a space as subjective as media. Better 'tools for managing all the tools' are a sensible next step here, as right now nobody even has time to take in the pace of change, let alone make best use of all the freestanding tools that exist.

Look for further, staggering progress in stitching together GenAI synthetic footage into longer media, even as everyone's attention span collapses down towards 10-second clips anyway. And look for massively powerful repurposing tools, including ones from Axle AI, that can make sensible use of the real-world footage you already have. Mostly, look for it all to happen very, very fast.