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For Sanket ‘Don’ Vanzara, the real disruption caused by artificial intelligence in entertainment is not about machines replacing creative professionals. It is about how technology is changing the economics of producing, scaling and distributing content.
“The question is no longer whether AI will replace creative people. The more interesting question is what becomes valuable when anyone can produce content,” says Vanzara.
That perspective comes from someone who has spent 27 years building and managing production systems and has seen the entertainment business evolve through multiple technological shifts.
“I have spent much of my career building production systems. It is fascinating to see technology now challenge many of the assumptions those systems were built on.”
Traditionally, large-scale production required infrastructure, capital, specialised teams, time and access. These requirements created natural barriers to entry and gave established production ecosystems a clear advantage.
AI is beginning to reduce many of those barriers.
Across development, pre-production, visualisation, post-production, localisation, editing and content adaptation, technology is making several processes faster and more cost-efficient. As those efficiencies become more widely available, Vanzara believes production capability by itself will become less of a competitive advantage.
“When production becomes abundant, the ability to produce content is no longer the biggest advantage. Knowing what is worth producing becomes the advantage.”
This shift could fundamentally change where value sits in the entertainment business.
Ideas, intellectual property, creative judgement, audience understanding and the ability to identify stories with genuine potential could become increasingly important. As the volume of content grows, the challenge will no longer be simply creating more. It will be knowing what deserves to be created, invested in and scaled.
For entertainment companies, this may also mean a shift away from being defined primarily by production capacity.
The strongest businesses of the future could be those that build valuable IP, understand audience behaviour, identify cultural shifts early and know how to use technology to move strong creative ideas faster.
Vanzara believes AI should therefore be seen as an enabler rather than an alternative to creativity.
“Technology can accelerate the process of making entertainment. It cannot replace the human instinct that tells you why a character matters, why a story connects or why an audience should care.”
Technology can potentially reduce timelines, make experimentation less expensive, enable multiple versions of content and help stories travel across markets more efficiently. What it cannot easily replicate is judgement — the instinct to understand emotion, culture, context and audience connection.
That distinction could become even more important as generative tools become increasingly accessible.
When everyone has access to powerful production technology, access itself stops being the differentiator. The advantage moves towards those who know how to use that technology around stronger ideas.
For Vanzara, the future of entertainment will therefore not be defined by a battle between technology and creative talent.
“The future is about putting technology around creativity and allowing human judgement to do what machines cannot.”
As AI continues to make production faster, cheaper and more scalable, the real premium may increasingly move towards originality, intellectual property and the human ability to recognise which stories are truly worth telling.