As in so many aspects of media & entertainment, AI has found its way into exhibition. Speakers at an International Cinema Technology Association-hosted CinemaCon seminar suggested that AI can bring efficiencies in areas including audience analytics and automated customer service, but it’s not for everything and can’t replace the human component, at least not yet.
Jeff Rosenfeld, Cinemark‘s senior vice president of digital and customer experience, called AI a “great tool” but added, “we haven’t seen anything yet that’s producing something better than the human team could do.
“It’s great to use an ideation and brainstorming phrase of the process,” he continued, adding as an example that “I can go in and produce a great asset, but I don’t have that background of communicating with the customer and [knowing] what’s going to motivate the customer. And I think that’s where having someone with that creative power, using that tool, is going to produce something so much better and more effective. So I think it’s a collaboration.”
“You do need that human oversight at the moment,” agreed Otto Turton, chief commercial officer at Vue Cinemas. “If you think about what AI is great at, it’s digesting the density of data and finding patterns of data that it’s beyond what any human can look at in their lifetime. … But then the human [can add to this by] looking at trends and culture.”
Turton reported that his chain has found advantages for using AI for scheduling. “It’s had a pretty meaningful effect on our scheduling,” he said. “The volume of sessions we can schedule increase 10% more that previously.”
Norma Garcia, CEO of NRJ Media Group, added that AI can also bring “a tremendous amount of value” by taking certain marketing tasks. “It’s such a value tool that it frees up marketing to be more strategic and think about the emotion storytelling.”
Alan Roe, CEO of ticketing systems developer Jacro, suggested that AI removes some barriers. “That’s what a lot of it is doing for me in my day job – efficiency, to remove repetitive, boring, annoying tasks.”
Panelists largely sidestepped industry concerns about job retention. Garcia acknowledged that there’s a “fear factor” around AI, and suggested that addressing that fear starts with education.
