Amazon Turns to AI to Cut Costs, Speed Up Film and TV Production
By Pallavi Chakravorty ·
Amazon is reportedly planning to use artificial intelligence to accelerate the production of films and television programmes, a move that comes amid growing concern in Hollywood that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry.
According to a Reuters report, Amazon MGM Studios COO and Co-head of Television, Albert Cheng, is leading a team tasked with developing new AI tools designed to reduce costs and streamline the creative process. Amazon plans to launch a closed beta of the tools in March, inviting selected industry partners to test them, with results expected by May.
Cheng described the new AI Studio as a “start-up” operating under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s “two-pizza team” philosophy, which keeps teams small and agile. The unit is made up largely of product engineers and scientists, supported by a smaller group drawn from creative and business roles, according to the report.
Amazon’s public embrace of AI comes as production budgets continue to spiral, limiting the number of films and series studios can afford to back. The company believes AI can speed up certain stages of production, allowing more projects to be made more efficiently.
“The cost of creating is so high that it is really hard to make more, and really hard to take great risk,” Cheng told Reuters. “We fundamentally believe that AI can accelerate, but it won’t replace the innovation and unique contributions that humans bring to the work.”
The push into AI arrives as prominent actors, including Emily Blunt, have voiced concerns about the technology, particularly the rise of AI-generated performers, and the threat they could pose to jobs in the industry.
The Amazon executive stressed that writers, directors, actors and character designers will remain involved at every stage of production, with AI positioned as a tool to enhance creativity rather than replace it. Like many technology companies, Amazon has instructed teams across its business to find uses for AI, and has pointed to the technology’s growing role as one factor behind its decision to cut around 30,000 corporate jobs since October, including roles at Prime Video.
Cheng said AI could help Prime Video address some of the inherent challenges of large-scale film and television production. The AI Studio is developing tools to bridge what he called the “last mile” between consumer-grade AI products and the level of control directors require for cinematic content. These include improving character consistency across shots and integrating AI systems with industry-standard creative software.
Amazon is drawing on its cloud arm, Amazon Web Services, and plans to work with multiple large language model providers to give creators greater choice across pre- and post-production. Cheng said protecting intellectual property and ensuring AI-generated material is not reused to train other models would be critical to winning industry trust.
The AI Studio is collaborating with producers Robert Stromberg, through his company Secret City, actor Kunal Nayyar and his Good Karma Productions, and former Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic animator Colin Brady as it explores new tools and how best to deploy them.
Launched last August, the studio has pointed to its series House of David as an early example of AI’s potential. For the second season of the biblical drama, director Jon Erwin used AI alongside live-action footage to create battle scenes, blending the two to expand the scale of sequences at a lower cost.