How do you reflect on your first year at Avid? Does that tie into any wider shifts in the industry you’ve seen over the last year?
My first year was about focus, modernisation, and momentum. Focus on what works and what differentiates Avid: our core IP, our role at the heart of media workflows, and how we modernise that in a way that lets us leapfrog and drive industry-wide momentum. At the same time, across the industry, I see a period of rationalisation and reinvention, with customers looking to simplify workflows and rethink how technology supports creativity. There’s strong interest in AI and cloud, but it’s cautious and pragmatic—people want real transformation and the technology that enables them to achieve that. We’re investing in that technology and working with our partners to drive the changes our customers need, but at the right pace for them.
What’s the most important thing that customers are asking for right now – and how is that influencing your product roadmap?
We hear a lot about the need for hybrid workflows. Customers want to give teams the ability to work from anywhere, but they don’t want to abandon significant on-prem investments overnight. Alongside that, they’re asking for open, interoperable systems rather than ecosystems in walled gardens, and for much clearer cost control and ROI. Those themes are directly shaping our roadmap – from being API-first, to building open ecosystems, and enabling customers to adopt new models at their own pace rather than through a “big bang” transition.
We’ve seen an accelerated shift to cloud across the industry over the last year, including Avid’s agreement with AWS. What’s behind it? How are you helping customers navigate this change?
The shift to cloud is being driven by the need for flexibility, scalability, and the ability to collaborate without geographic constraints. At Avid, we’re helping customers integrate their on-prem investments with the cloud, because hybrid is the reality today. Avid Content Core is delivered as a multi-tenant SaaS platform. Customers share the underlying platform and services, but their media and IP remain fully isolated. I often describe it as like living in an apartment building: everyone shares the utilities, but each customer still has their own secure, private space. Over time, cloud can become the primary compute layer, with on-prem playing more of a disaster-recovery role, and that transition happens step by step, with predictability and confidence.
How important is MovieLabs’ 2030 Vision to Avid and its customers? How is Avid’s own vision reflected in its solutions?
MovieLabs’ 2030 Vision is hugely important to us, and we’re strongly aligned with it. Avid Content Core is a clear example of that alignment: it provides centralised asset identity and management, federated search, distributed storage, remote access, and supports cloud-plus-on-prem federation in line with MovieLabs’ principles. Importantly, we’re not just aiming for compliance, we’re actively putting those ideas into practice.
Content provenance, authenticity, and tracking are becoming hugely important. What changes are you seeing, and how are customers asking you to help?
This has become a major focus, especially with the rise of AI and concerns around deepfakes. Customers want clear asset-level lineage. Who created something? Who transformed it? And who touched it at every stage? There’s also growing demand for watermarking and verification, not just for monetisation but to understand where content ends up once it leaves their direct control. With Avid Content Core, every asset is fingerprinted and tracked within the Avid ecosystem, creating the foundation for authenticity, provenance, and trusted distribution at scale.
Where are you seeing AI and automation have the biggest impact for postproduction and news teams? Will this evolve in 2026?
The biggest impact is in removing friction from workflows rather than replacing people. AI can automate time-consuming preparation tasks: searching for content, cataloguing it, enriching metadata, and assembling material, so editors and journalists can spend more time on storytelling. We’re very focused on AI at the workflow level, not just feature-level AI. Automated transcription, translation, summarisation, scene detection, and other functions are all about getting to an outcome, and that outcome is storytelling. As we move through 2026, these advances will evolve into more agent-based systems that proactively surface the right material at the right time, ultimately reducing time to story.
What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the industry this year, and how is Avid addressing them?
Economic pressure and the demand for greater efficiency are major challenges, alongside increasingly fragmented workflows across on-prem, cloud, and remote teams. Avid Content Core helps address this by unifying workflows, reducing friction, and enabling hybrid adoption with real operational and economic benefits, and ensuring trust by training AI models that understand media context, rather than generic, off-the-shelf AI. Partnerships are critical here too, particularly deep collaborations that go beyond infrastructure and help us build solutions fit for real-world media production. For instance, we collaborate with AWS engineers and services, not just their platform, to build products.
Can you give us a sneak preview of what to expect from Avid this year?
You’ll see us continue to build on the foundation we’ve established with Avid Content Core, especially around workflow automation and location-free creativity. That includes greater flexibility between web-based and traditional editing, and more seamless interoperability across environments. You’ll also see continued momentum around openness, APIs, and hybrid cloud innovation across our portfolio, always with a focus on delivering tangible value to customers rather than technology for its own sake.
Can you give us three words to describe where the media and entertainment industry is right now?
Transforming. Accelerating. Reimagining.
From a personal point of view, why do you enjoy being part of the technology side of the media and entertainment industry?
It’s rare to work in a technology space where the output is culture, stories, and human connection. Content moves the world – with the power to shift emotions, influence opinions and connect with people. What we enable ultimately shapes how people see the world, how they’re informed, how they’re entertained, and how they’re inspired. Being able to combine deep technology with that kind of creative and cultural impact is incredibly motivating.
