Summary
- For media companies, AI is the key to unlocking new revenue from dormant content archives and creating measurable, multi-platform ad campaigns.
- Veritone’s aiWARE, an operating platform for AI, provides the foundation to solve this by making every media asset intelligent, searchable, and ready for monetization.
- With AI integrated into their operations, organizations can help turn archives into profit centers and prove ad effectiveness, bridging the readiness gap and gaining a competitive edge
With traditional revenue streams under pressure, media companies face a dual challenge: how to monetize vast archives and create effective, measurable ads for a multi-platform world.1 Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a powerful part of the solution. AI can help turn dormant content into revenue opportunities and improve advertising effectiveness. It’s fundamental to how the industry will operate and profit, with agent-driven AI representing a key enabler to unlocking value and tackling both of these complex problems head-on.
That’s one of the many reasons the buzz at this year’s NAB show won’t just be about new cameras or editing software; it will be about how AI can drive new sources of revenue across the entire industry. While many other sectors are still just exploring AI, M&E companies are grappling with an urgent mandate. Should they integrate AI now, or risk becoming irrelevant in a rapidly evolving landscape?
As technology advances, a critical ‘readiness gap’ has emerged. Only 14% of M&E companies feel prepared for AI-driven content creation, according to a December 2025 EY study.2 That’s understandable. For a supply chain already plagued by friction from manual processes, siloed systems, and slow handoffs, adding disparate AI tools only multiplies the chaos. The truth, however, is that AI shouldn’t add complexity; it should solve it by supporting the entire content supply chain, whether you’re auto-tagging massive archives or activating highly measurable cross-platform ad campaigns.
An operating system for AI
For the 86% of companies that say they’re not yet AI-ready, an AI operating platform provides a unified data foundation, robust APIs, and pre-built applications that empower organizations to put AI at the core of their operations. Veritone’s aiWARE platform, for example, is specifically designed to integrate the power of AI across business processes and applications.
Instead of stitching together separate solutions, aiWARE functions as a foundational platform for AI, built to support broadcast enterprises including ESPN, Newsmax, and CBS. It starts by ingesting both structured and unstructured data (audio, video, and text) from virtually any source. It then puts hundreds of different AI models to work, automatically selecting an appropriate model for a given task, whether that’s automating repetitive tasks, finding valuable information, or transforming that information into valuable business insights.
From Dusty Archives to Dynamic AI Agent-Powered Revenue Streams
Many media organizations have untapped value in their content archives, yet decades of archives often remain a “black box”, largely unsearchable and difficult to monetize. Beyond just finding a clip, knowing if you have the right to use it creates a slow, risky bottleneck. Veritone Digital Media Hub addresses this challenge by transforming static archives into searchable, monetizable assets. Using AI-powered metadata tagging and indexing, media organizations can quickly locate, package, and distribute content at scale. This enables teams to unlock new licensing opportunities while maintaining control over how their content is accessed and used.
Now, that intelligent archive can become more interactive. Veritone’s next-generation solution, Discovery Content Intelligence with VERI, works with Digital Media Hub to move beyond simple search. Instead of just locating clips, users can query their archives in natural language to surface key moments, themes, sentiment, and other insights more quickly. This allows teams to analyze content, track coverage, and identify relevant segments with greater speed and precision.
Connecting broadcast ads to digital action
AI also has an important role to play in the ad side of the business. For decades, broadcasters have faced a fundamental challenge: proving the direct impact of a radio or TV advertisement on an advertiser’s website traffic. In a world demanding measurable ROI, this attribution gap has been a major point of friction between media sellers and buyers. Without concrete data, it’s difficult to prove campaign effectiveness and optimize ad spending for better results.
Veritone Attribute and Discovery are designed to close the long-standing attribution gap for broadcasters. Working in tandem, these AI-powered applications provide near real-time correlation between broadcast ad placements and website activity. Attribute bridges the gap between a broadcast spot and a customer’s digital action, while Discovery provides automated “proof of play” by tracking ad airchecks across markets.
Together, Veritone Attribute and Discovery help organizations more efficiently verify when and where content aired, track brand mentions, and assess content performance. By automating these workflows, teams can move from manual verification to faster, more scalable analysis.
From potential to performance: the path to AI readiness
The journey from a fragmented supply chain to a lean, intelligent operation begins with a shift in mindset—from seeing AI as a collection of tools to embracing it as an agent-driven core operating system. For the vast majority of M&E companies not yet prepared for the future, this shift is a critical step toward sustainable growth and innovation.
For media organizations under pressure to do more with their content, AI readiness is no longer theoretical. By connecting archives, workflows, and advertising intelligence across the content lifecycle, Veritone’s aiWARE platform helps turn disconnected media operations into ones that are more searchable, measurable, and monetizable.
We look forward to showcasing our Commercial solutions during the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas from April 19 to 22, in booth #W1453 in the Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall. If you’re ready to learn more, schedule some time to meet with our team onsite.
Sources
2ey.com/en_us/insights/cmo/how-ai-is-transforming-media-entertainment-marketing
