I occupy a rare position in the AI-and-media conversation. I run Biricik Media Productions, a traditional media company founded in 2009. I also build AI-powered creative tools through ZSky AI and cemhan.ai. I am both the incumbent being disrupted and the disruptor doing the disrupting. This gives me a perspective that pure traditionalists and pure technologists do not have.
Here is my honest assessment: AI is neither the salvation nor the apocalypse that the media industry alternately celebrates and fears. It is a tool — a remarkably powerful one — that amplifies whatever intention guides it.
Where AI Genuinely Excels
AI has dramatically accelerated several areas of production. Pre-visualization is one: I can generate concept images in minutes that used to require hours of sketching or mood-board assembly. This does not replace the creative vision behind those concepts. It accelerates the communication of that vision to clients and team members.
Technical post-production tasks are another area of genuine improvement. Noise reduction, upscaling, background removal, transcription, caption generation — these are tasks that consumed hours of skilled labor and now take seconds. Freeing producers from these technical burdens allows them to focus on the creative decisions that actually define the work.
Content adaptation for multiple platforms is a third area. AI can reformat, resize, and adjust pacing for different platform requirements with a speed and consistency that manual processes cannot match.
AI is the best assistant I have ever had. It is also the worst creative director I have ever seen.
Where AI Falls Short
AI cannot generate authentic emotional resonance. It can mimic the surface features of emotionally powerful content, but it cannot create the genuine human truth that makes audiences feel something real. My 50 million view viral video succeeded because it captured an authentic moment that no AI could have predicted, recognized, or reproduced.
AI struggles with cultural nuance. It does not understand that a particular color combination carries different connotations in different cultures. It does not sense that a specific pacing choice feels appropriate for a luxury brand but wrong for a sports brand. These contextual decisions require lived experience and human intuition.
AI cannot manage client relationships. The discovery conversations that define our production process require empathy, business understanding, and the ability to hear what a client means beneath what they say. No AI handles this.
The Producer's New Role
AI is elevating the role of the producer from executor to curator. The value of a producer in 2026 is not in the technical execution of tasks — AI handles much of that now. The value is in vision, judgment, and taste. Knowing what to create, not how to create it. Knowing what to select from AI-generated options, not how to generate those options.
This is actually a return to what production was always supposed to be. The best directors never operated their own cameras. The best photographers never processed their own film. The creative vision was always the irreplaceable element. AI is simply making that truth inescapable.
Building ZSky AI: Lessons from Both Sides
Building ZSky AI taught me that the best AI creative tools are designed by people who deeply understand the creative process, not just the technology. Every feature in ZSky reflects a production decision I have made thousands of times at Biricik Media. The technology serves the creative process because it was built by someone who lives that process daily.
This is why I am optimistic about the intersection of AI and media production. When AI tools are built by producers, they amplify production quality. When they are built by technologists alone, they optimize for metrics that do not align with creative excellence.
My Advice to Producers
Learn the tools. Do not fear them, and do not worship them. Use AI for what it does well and guard fiercely the creative decisions it cannot make. Your eye for color, your instinct for sound, your sense of story — these are more valuable now than ever, precisely because AI has commoditized everything else.
Read my broader perspective on the media industry in 2026 or explore the future of content creation.