AI and the Entertainment Revolution

A New Stage for Creativity, Commerce, and Caution
In the constellation of global industries, few shine as brightly — or are as emotionally resonant — as entertainment. From big-screen cinema and television broadcasting to OTT platforms and immersive digital media, entertainment is not just business; it shapes culture, identity, and collective imagination. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to become the next seismic force to transform this sector — redefining creativity, economics, and global cultural influence in ways as profound as sound in film or colour in television once did.
At the heart of this transformation is the convergence of content, data, and technology. AI is no longer confined to narrow backend applications; it is intimately woven into how stories are conceived, produced, personalised, distributed, and monetised across the entire entertainment ecosystem.
A Monumental Market — On the Cusp of Expansion
Globally, the entertainment and media industry remains a colossus. According to PwC, the sector is projected to reach $3.5 trillion in revenue by 2029, with digital formats like connected TV, gaming, and personalised advertising driving much of this growth. AI-powered advertising alone is expected to be a key revenue booster, supporting this expansion and rewarding agile innovators. 
Specific to AI in media and entertainment, market projections show the global AI segment reaching nearly $100 billion by 2030, growing at over 24% annually. These AI tools span automatic content tagging, smart recommendations, scalable personalisation, and real-time analytics that help platforms better understand — and serve — their audiences. 
In India, too, the scale of entertainment is enormous and rapidly growing. The Indian media and entertainment sector was estimated at around ₹2.5 trillion ($28 billion) in 2024, and is projected to rise to ₹3.1 trillion by 2027, roughly a 7% annual growth. Even more dynamic is the AI subset: the Indian AI in media and entertainment market could grow from roughly $1.7 billion in 2024 to over $7.8 billion by 2030, expanding at a ~28% CAGR. 
These numbers matter because they illustrate not only current value but potential scale. They underline entertainment’s economic muscle and hint at opportunity for wealth creation, jobs, creative diversification, and exportable cultural assets.
From Creation to Consumption: The AI Impact Across the Pipeline
AI’s influence touches nearly every part of the entertainment value chain:
• Content Creation:
Generative AI tools are assisting writers, directors, and editors by suggesting plot structures, improving dialogues, and even composing music. Studios are using AI to automate aspects of script processing and early conceptualisation. These tools do not replace artistic sensibilities but augment them, enabling creators to explore more ideas with greater speed and lower cost. 
• Production & Post-Production:
AI is transforming visual effects (VFX), rendering, colour grading, sound design, and even real-time virtual production workflows. In India, the VFX segment has grown robustly because of digitalisation and AI adoption, while the streaming video market — powered largely by algorithmic recommendations — is projected to reach $7 billion by 2027. 
• Recommendations & Engagement:
Streaming platforms use machine learning to personalise suggestions — a key reason why viewers spend more time on services tailored to their tastes. The impact is not trivial: personalised recommendations can lift watch-time metrics dramatically by showing users what they are most likely to enjoy. 
• Distribution & Monetisation: 
AI enables dynamic ad placement, predictive pricing, and even forecasting content performance before launch. For OTT and television, this means not just efficiency, but smarter monetisation aligned with real-time user behaviour. 
Collectively, these capabilities suggest a future where storytelling and data insights work in tandem — a fusion that increases efficiency, lowers barriers to entry for creators, and expands audience reach.
India’s Strategic Imperatives: Embrace, Empower, and Regulate
India stands at an inflection point. Traditionally holding around 2 % of the global media and entertainment market, Information and Broadcasting leaders have warned that the country risks losing ground in the global content economy if AI adoption lags. 
Yet India possesses unique advantages: a multilingual creative talent pool, a booming young audience, and a rapidly growing digital ecosystem. Government forums like WAVES 2025 have sought to bridge creativity and technology, promoting India as a global hub for film, digital content, gaming, and animation. 
For policymakers, the task is threefold:
Encourage Innovation and Investment: Through incentive regimes, R&D support, and access to infrastructure, India can accelerate AI adoption in entertainment.
Protect Rights and Creators: The rise of AI has sparked global debates over copyright use and content training data. In India, industry groups are pressing for new legal frameworks to protect creators’ intellectual property in an AI era. 
Ensure Responsible, Ethical Use: Algorithmic bias, data privacy, and job displacement are real concerns. Responsible AI policies should combine innovation with fairness — protecting cultural diversity and human creativity without stifling technology.
Balancing Optimism and Critical Reality
AI is not a magic wand. There are structural challenges: high implementation costs, privacy regulation hurdles, and infrastructure gaps can slow adoption — especially for smaller enterprises. Ethically, unchecked automation could erode jobs, homogenise artistic voices, or over-amplify dominant cultural narratives. Even globally, voice artists and other professionals are pushing back against unregulated use of AI models that could supplant human nuance.
But these challenges are not reasons to resist progress. Rather, they are calls to shape a thoughtful, equitable future for AI in entertainment — one where technology augments rather than replaces human imagination, and where policy supports both innovation and inclusion.
Conclusion
AI is reshaping entertainment with unprecedented speed and potential. For India — especially in the context of global forums like the World AI Summit — the mission is clear: embrace AI with ambition but deploy it with responsibility. Doing so could unlock not just economic value, but a more vibrant, diverse, and globally resonant creative ecosystem for decades to come.

(Uday Kumar Varma is an IAS officer. Retired as Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting)