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Media and entertainment companies should be unlocking the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize content creation, audience engagement and revenue generation, according to Ankur Jain, SVP of sales at Prime Focus Technologies.

“Today, I will try to give you some insights about how AI can be helpful in your journey to discover, curate and publish content on social media,” he said May 23 at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) at The Culver Theater, during  the session “Revolutionizing Social Media for Revenue Generation with the Power of AI.”

He focused on social media because it is no longer used for promotional purposes alone. It has, after all, been quickly becoming a major revenue generator for enterprises.

Prime Focus is partnering with and has been “certified by pretty much all the big social media players,” Jain told attendees. “That’s important when you are accessing” an application programming interface (API) or you’re trying to use technology to do things at scale.”

He went on to point out that the Covid pandemic had “a lot of impact and, because of that, things changed a lot” in the industry.

For example, the internet is now “penetrated pretty deep [and] all of us are doing things virtually” that we used to do in-person, he noted. “I’m happy to see most of you here physically. But, over the last two years, we have been doing things virtually, and if we are talking of four and a half billion social media profiles, it just shows the kind of market potential which is out there.”

However, he stressed: “The question is: Can we harness it?”

Social media is a “global phenomenon and that means when you are trying to reach this audience, you have to try to attack this problem in a very global fashion – be it localization, be it compliance…. You have to kind of use different ways of communicating the same message because your audience might be different” in each market, he said, adding the platforms themselves are adapting.

That raises a few more questions, he said: “How do you adapt? How do you keep pace? Who’s monetizing? Who is not? If somebody is monetizing, what are they monetizing? Are they monetizing for the creators? Are they monetizing for the brands? How do I make money on these platforms?”

“These are real questions and we need to be very well aware of what we are trying to do when we are even attempting social media monetization,” he argued.

One challenge is that people and organizations tend to have “very finite resources,” he said.

Meanwhile, “we need to constantly learn about the platform,” he said, calling that a “very time consuming process.” And “not only you need to know but your teams need to understand it” also, he said.

It is also important for each organization to get its team operating at scale, he told attendees.

Organizations need to also know what they are trying to achieve, he argued. “It is definitely not about just uploading the content.” Are you looking to offer short videos, which tend to drive audiences to long-form videos? One important thing to know: “Long form is driving a lot of consumption, a lot of monetization,” he said.

To view the presentation, click here.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and presented by Amazon Studios Technology, with sponsorship by Fortinet, Genpact, Prime Focus Technologies, Signiant, Softtek, Convergent, Gracenote, Altman Solon, AppTek, Ascendion, Coresite, EPAM, MicroStrategy, Veritone, CDSA, EIDR and PDG Consulting.