🧠 Google Cloud Bets Big on Agentic AI at IBC 2026
Anshul Kapoor, Director of Global Media and Entertainment at Google Cloud, shared a visionary perspective on the transformation of the media industry. According to Kapoor, 2026 marks a major turning point: the era of isolated tests and generative experiments with prompt boxes has come to an end.
The industry is moving toward scalable, enterprise-grade deployment of artificial intelligence within real-world broadcast and production pipelines.
The core technological paradigm for Google Cloud at IBC 2026 was agentic AI. Unlike standard models that simply react to single text prompts, AI agents can understand high-level business goals and autonomously orchestrate complex end-to-end workflows—from rights management and metadata archiving to automated localization and real-time sports highlight generation. Crucially, the human-in-the-loop philosophy remains central: AI handles the heavy technical lifting, leaving final editorial control and creative direction to human professionals.
As part of the IBC Accelerator programme—where Google Cloud once again served as a main sponsor—the company is guiding and supporting several key research initiatives:
- Smart Stories Incubator: An initiative aimed at standardizing how systems interact with news content across all production stages using the Story Object Model.
- Delta Protocol (in collaboration with DAZN): A conceptual video streaming project where traditional distribution is replaced by semantic data transmission and client-side generative scene reconstruction.
- Q-stream and meCast: Projects focused on developing quantum-safe infrastructure and AI-driven orchestration for sports broadcasting.
At the Google Cloud booth in Amsterdam, end-to-end multimodal solutions powered by Gemini, Imagen, Veo, and the Google Flow tool were on full display. As company executives noted, embedding AI directly into familiar editing and broadcast systems addresses the media industry’s biggest challenge—fragmented legacy infrastructure—turning isolated archives into active monetization drivers.
Source: IBC
