AI overview
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the role of producers in film and TV, helping them navigate complex tasks from budgeting and scheduling to creative decision-making. AI-driven tools can analyse audience preferences and predict engagement, allowing producers to make data-driven decisions about casting, storyline, and marketing strategies. This opportunity of predictive analysis enables producers to align their projects more closely with audience expectations, enhancing their chances of success.
AI software can at times help with optimisation of production logistics by assisting in scheduling, resource management, and risk assessment, making it easier to control costs and timelines while still meeting the important creative goals. AI can streamline collaboration across departments, automate workflows and be used to track production and schedule progress in real-time. For producers, this kind of integration means faster communication and fewer bottlenecks in HETV and film production. Allowing a production team to concentrate on meaningful high-level planning and creative oversight, rather than getting bogged down by administrative tasks.
To prepare for these advancements, producers could become familiar with AI-based production tools, many of which are starting to be integrated directly into production management software, with a particular thought towards data analytics, which will enhance their ability to lead projects in an increasingly tech driven industry. Consideration could also be given to the new role of data coordinator and how the use of data in a production can improve insight and efficiency by identifying opportunities. Effective use of AI is very dependent on comprehensive access to accurate and relevant data.
So what is AI?
Put simply, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a goal. It’s an ambition to program machines and software to behave in a way that seems human-like or ‘intelligent’.
Rather than simply obeying instructions, AI systems aim to reason, learn, communicate and make decisions, mimicking the kind of traits we associate with humans.
Before you read further, have a look at the ScreenSkills AI 101 page (also linked in the resources section below).
What are producers starting to use AI for in 2025?
Early budgeting, scheduling and scenario modelling
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- AI can run budget and schedule projections even before the script is locked. You can simulate different production scenarios to test cost impacts, and potentially offer department heads tools and simulations to help visualise the implications of their creative decisions.
Policy alignment and social responsibility checks
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- Can be used as a review and summary tool to help your production line up with funders’ expectations for diversity, sustainability, inclusion and training. It can be applied to look for things that are missing and suggest region-specific improvements or partnerships.
AI-enhanced planning tools
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- Production planning and previsualisation platforms can now be AI-enabled, automating some processes and aiming to speed up the breaking down of scripts, drafting schedules and visualising workflows.
Document tracking and version comparison
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- Helps you keep tabs on draft changes, highlight what’s new, and make sure all versions of contracts, scripts or reports are in order, especially useful on fast-moving projects with multiple collaborators.
Real-time progress tracking and crew coordination
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- Where they have sufficient access to real-time data, AI tools can automate crew scheduling and meeting bookings, while progress tracking dashboards give you a clearer view of where things are actually at, even across multiple units.
Automated reporting and summarisation
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- Summarises daily notes, unit reports and to-do lists. It can also help automate cost tracking and highlight things that need your attention without searching through everything manually.
Creative and compliance visibility
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- Tracks creative decisions across departments and flags risks in areas like health and safety or compliance. Especially useful when it’s tricky to keep up with every update as it happens.
Problem-solving and communication support
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- AI can potentially work well as a second opinion or sounding board. Good for generating draft emails, preparation of notes for difficult conversations, or working through alternative approaches when a bit of lateral thinking is needed.
Data organisation and searchability
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- From notes and documents to creative references, AI can structure and label your production archive so it’s searchable down the line, whether it’s for delivery, audit or in prep for the next series.
Identifying trends and performance analysis
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- Post-wrap, AI can help you make sense of and review complex and large datasets, by visualising them in different ways, or looking for patterns in spend vs. value, team performance or logistical bottlenecks. This kind of enhanced review process can help inform the next project.
How is AI limited in helping a producer?
"Understanding the script is critical to optimising a production. I’d love an AI to do this for me, [but] if I don’t understand the consequences myself I can’t do it well.”
AI assistants can be a brilliant tool to summarise and help analyse production schedules or changes of note. However, digging into the schedule and understanding it and the implications yourself is still crucial. Rather than replacing your laborious jobs with AI, it’s worth thinking about how they could be made more enjoyable, faster or easier to engage with as a freelancer.
Creating a high-end television production often involves many aspects of collaboration with other departments. Significant effort is put into creating the right kind of environment where people can give their best contribution. This kind of relational human collaboration can be very difficult for an AI to manage, crucially the systems often don’t have access to the important real-time data, and secondly the previous training data can be very poor. Being able to respond when things don’t quite go to plan means that many aspects will need to be managed by a human for quite some time.
When working with crew it can be challenging to communicate guidelines for the use of AI, especially when development of AI is so fast paced. Even if you or the team don’t know the answer to these questions, it is still valuable to challenge production teams to consider the implications of their actions.
A quick ‘checklist’ summary of things you might want to consider before you use AI in your department in high-end television.
- Do I have permission to use the data I’m sending to an AI?
- Who owns the output that will be created?
- Is my input data stored or reused?
- Was this AI trained ethically (with consented or licensed material)?
- How might this use impact creative jobs?
- Is the output accurate, verifiable or likely to cause reputational risk?
- Could the output unintentionally imitate someone else’s work?
- Am I being transparent about how this AI was used?
- Does this use align with my employer's or customers' policies?
Preparing for the future as a producer
Many of the benefits for producers are to be gained by the automated collection, preparation, analysis and presentation of real-time production data. This gives the producer a timely overview of what is happening right now and enables them to extrapolate that trajectory into future production.
To truly reap the advantages of these systems, it is worth considering expanding your knowledge beyond sophisticated Excel sheets or movie magic into AI and cloud-enabled systems like Airtable and Python scripting languages. This can be intimidating, and certainly is a learning curve, but a great reward is to be found when being able to automate some of these processes across a production. Some high-end production teams are even working with in-house programmers and developers to create the kinds of automation and data collection that empower incredibly efficient and flexible processes. AI in this context can be hosted directly on local machines, ensuring data confidentiality throughout.
There are also less distracting, new forms of data collection now available. For example, video capture to text and audio transcription, which, in effect, allow a producer to have insight into all aspects of a production, and improve their access to broader sets of data. How we achieve a balance between trusting good intent, with perhaps more invasive data collection, is very important. The potential is there for the taking; this might be the key to releasing departments from laborious reporting.
Learning how to use AI to catalogue, label and archive your own data could help benefit your department. As a freelancer, you could also consider including notes, working drawings, along with images and videos. These, alongside costings, plans, schedules and timings of production, will help enable you to train AI in the future to automate tasks or assist in providing useful estimates to other departments. Perhaps in the future, you may be able to have your own department AI assistant that can answer common external requests, or offer you insight or warnings when aspects are not on track as expected.
It will be important to keep abreast of developments utilising new forms of AI computing in real-time, especially those like virtual production, techniques for automated environment creation and volumetric capture.
Care can be considered when working with freelancers, who may hold differing views and opinions on how they are allowed to use AI in a production. Clear communication of the broadcasters and streamers' production policies is valuable, and if they are vague or insufficient, then at least aim to set basic expectations around data confidentiality and content authenticity.
Engaging in training through ScreenSkills and other online resources will be valuable for producers aiming to stay at the forefront of the industry. Producers who embrace these new technologies will be better equipped to lead projects. Delivering a blend of technical understanding and traditional oversight, achieving harmony and efficiency.
Links to other ScreenSkills resources
Discover the producer job profiles in:
Explore more AI-related training, events and opportunities with ScreenSkills
Read AI 101, an overview of some aspects of AI in the UK film and TV industry