GenAI tools are dramatically simplifying the video production process
Video used to be very expensive and time-consuming for companies and individuals to produce. Then, with the widespread adoption of smartphones that came with the ability to capture video seamlessly, and an associated drop in viewers’ expectations of high-quality output, the cost and time requirements for video production have declined precipitously.
The most recent impact on the cost and time required to produce video content is generative AI (GenAI) which has become a transformative force in video production across the entire creation process.
Ongoing Popularity of Video Prompts Adoption
In an environment where video continues to be a powerful way to capture attention and gain interest among target audiences of all kinds that’s good news that brands are already capitalizing on. Based on input from 1200 marketers, the Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 15th annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, produced in 2025 revealed that:
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- 61% of respondents think their organizations will increase investments in videos, making it the top investment ahead of thought leadership content.
- Video represents the top area where B2B marketers will make increased investments (61%) compared to the next highest, thought leadership content at 52%.
- In 2025, 42% of respondents were using AI to create videos—up from 18% in 2024.
- Approximately 80% of marketers believe AI helps streamline the video production process, enabling faster turnaround times and higher-quality content.
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GenAI isn’t being used just to actually produce video—it’s also used extensively in pre-production processes, says Chris Lavigne, head of production at video marketing platform Wistia. In fact, he says, the planning scripting, storyboarding, and ideation capabilities of GenAI are more mature than purely text to video tools.
The CMI report confirms this. “Most marketers primarily use AI in either pre-production (scripting and brainstorming) or post-production editing (voice dubbing and generating visuals).” About 80% of these users “believe AI helps streamline the video production process, enabling faster turnaround times and higher-quality content.”
How it Works
GenAI for video production doesn’t just involve one application (see sidebar). Those tools represent a combination of third party and onsite, brand-specific tools.
As Quint Boa, a former BAFTA-nominated actor turned psychotherapist who founded creative video agency Synima, explains, text-to-video tools use “diffusion models trained on millions of video clips to generate visuals from prompts,” while voice cloning employs “neural networks trained on voice samples” to “recreate speech patterns, intonation, and emotional cues.” For lip-sync avatars, the technology combines “speech-to-text with facial landmark animation to sync voice with realistic face movement.”
Lavigne notes that the technology is evolving rapidly, especially for inanimate objects: “We’re definitely approaching that uncanny valley where you don’t know what’s real and what’s not with things like landscapes, animals, inanimate objects,” he says. Human expressions remain more challenging, though, he says, as “humans have been programmed for so long to be able to judge another human’s face and characteristics that we’re not falling for it quite yet.”
Context is also critical, especially in B2B environments, says Krish Mantripragada, Chief Product Officer at Seismic. B2B brands shouldn’t be creating generic content, but content that is very specific to their company and their situation, he says.
For B2B companies with extensive product portfolios serving multiple geographies and industries, AI must be grounded in enterprise content, Mantripragada agrees. “It’s less about trying to create content from scratch, based on a prompt that you’re giving it, and more about assembling and customizing the content based on your approved source of truth for that particular situation.”
This approach ensures that AI-generated content adheres to brand compliance, company policies, industry regulations, and approved messaging. The technology can also incorporate business context such as customer information, industry, deal stage, prior interactions, and products being pitched to create highly relevant video content.
Big Benefits From GenAI
About 10 years ago when he was editing video for documentaries, Lavigne says, you’d need to send the video out to be transcribed by a human editor and then you’d have a text document that you’d need to wade through to find the best quotes—a very time-consuming process. Today, he says, time codes are automatically linked to transcripts, making specific moment easy to find. AI can analyze video transcripts and suggest edits automatically.
“We’re one step away from programmatic video editing as well,” Lavigne says. The tools are not quite there yet, he says, but he expects they will be by the end of the year. “To my surprise, and chagrin, it’s happening very, very fast,” he says.
Beyond video editing, GenAI excels at creating multimodal learning content, Mantripragada adds. People have different learning needs and preferences—many prefer audio or video learning. “Being able to create multimodal content based on learner preferences is another huge advantage of AI, because historically, these were very sort of resource intensive, from both a capacity and skills perspective,” he says. “Previously, creating audio and video training materials required highly skilled trainers and significant resources.”
GenAI tools can be used to create audio and video lessons, podcasts and deep-dive study guides—even on-demand.
“You can create audio lessons. You can create podcasts. You can create deep dive study guides from a source content for very specific situations. And some of it can also be done on demand,” says Mantripragada. For instance, he says, users can interact with AI to ask probing questions. “And, by grounding it with all of your enterprise content, you can ensure that it doesn’t hallucinate or provide generic information which may not be relevant in that particular situation.”
But Some Drawbacks as Well
Despite its many benefits, Lavigne and others point out, GenAI-generated video isn’t infallible. Much like GenAI-generated text there are still some glitches that exist. For instance, Lavigne says, GenAI video often defies the basic laws of physics.
He explains: “If you were to prompt a GenAI tool like Runway to ‘show me a ball bouncing down a staircase,’ in your mind you would know what that should look like. What you’d see in the output, though, is that the ball isn’t really adhering to the laws of gravity.”
Another example, although an area that is changing very rapidly, Lavigne says, is GenAI’s ability to accurately portray human emotion. “A lot of these generative AI videos have no emotion in the eyes. They’re kind of dead-eyed, and they look soulless. If you try to show someone weeping or crying it’s usually over-exaggerated.”
Lavigne points out that “AI doesn’t quite know how to create a human image to be believable from all 360 degrees.” So, for instance, “their chin might change from a dead-on shot to when the camera is 90 degrees away. We’re seeing a lot of face distortions.” But, he adds, that’s today. “It’s all changing so rapidly that this probably isn’t going to be that big of a deal in the next few months.”
What is a big deal, though, is ensuring the appropriate and accurate use of these tools.
Guardrails for Using GenAI in Video Production
Establishing guardrails to ensure that GenAI tools are used appropriate when creating video is important for ensuring brand integrity and adhering to ethical standards of content creation (e.g., avoiding plagiarism).
One area of transparency that many may not consider, but that Lavigne emphasizes, is the importance of being transparent with talent. Video producers need to be “crystal clear with the talent” about whether they’re going to use AI or not. He recommends the use of talent release forms, something he says was emphasized with him during his early career. “Talent release forms need to spell out if you have permission, or if you don’t have permission, to synthesize their likeness,” he says.
For instance, will you putting talent into a scene that they were never actually in? Lavigne says that he is passionate about protecting the people on camera that have “been vulnerable to put themselves out there and be on camera.”
Another critical area of oversight—ensuring human review of the content produced. This is both to ensure accuracy and quality. GenAI tools are still widely known to “hallucinate,” or generate inaccurate information. In addition, in terms of image, as Lavigne noted, sometimes the output isn’t quite “right.”
AI, says Boa, can’t replace “cinematic direction, on-location shooting, or human intuition in storytelling.” Boa also points out that AI can’t guarantee copyright safety—”especially when using AI-generated visuals or voice clones.” It’s important to have clear policies on copyright checking for all AI-generated assets.
Basic security protocols should also be established. “Store sensitive or proprietary prompts/scripts securely; some models retain user input for training,” Boa points out. Many organizations are already doing this according to CMI; their research indicates that 66% of respondents have security measures in place specific to the use of GenAI.
Impact on Human Video Producers
One of the first questions that is often asked when considering the use of GenAI tools to do tasks that humans used to do is “Will humans be replaced?”
Lavigne doesn’t think so. “I was more afraid of this when it first came out,” he says. Today, though, he says, “I’m seeing it more as a tool like Photoshop is a tool for photographers.”
Some video production tasks simply need to be done using GenAI to achieve the greatest efficiencies possible, Lavigne says. “If you’re a video producer in 2025 and you’re not using a transcription tool to help you edit talking head video, you’re not going to be competitive with a video editor that is.”
Video producers simply must understand how to use the tools at their disposal right now, Lavigne says. “Otherwise you’re doing your job with both hands and feet tied behind your back. You need to be able to adapt and learn and understand where this can improve your workflow and where it can’t.” That said, he adds, video production still requires a “basic understanding of how to tell a story, and how to elicit an emotion.”
Mantripragada agrees, emphasizing that AI is empowering rather than replacing content creators. “Clearly, what we are most excited about with the technology is that it allows marketing folks, [sales] enablement folks, content creators, and trainers within the organization to very quickly, and in a cost effective and scalable manner, and to create lots of different formats, more modes, modalities, and content types, either on demand or on schedule,” he says. He points to tasks like creating comprehensive FAQs that previously required highly skilled professionals and significant time.
But, says Mantripragada, “It’s less about generating more content and more about how can I be smart about what I create and then measure engagement, effectiveness and conversion so I use AI effectively to generate more of what works.”
Skills Needed for AI Video Production
When asked about the skills people need to create video with AI effectively, Mantripragada emphasizes that users don’t need to be experts but should have a basic level of comfort with the technology. Prompt engineering is important, he says, along with understanding how to iteratively work with GenAI to have it fine tune and generate the output you’re looking for.
“I think they need to understand, essentially, to just be comfortable about the usage of GenAI technologies,” says Mantripragada. “You don’t need to be a super expert, but you need to have an appreciation for how to construct a good prompt, to understand what sources AI is pulling the data from, and how to work with AI to fine-tune and generate the content you’re looking for.”
Mantripragada adds that content creators will still need to validate the quality of AI-generated content. “You need to be the solution. The skill you need is ‘how do I instruct the AI with the right set of prompts and the right set of content sources to have it generate what I’m looking for and, ultimately, relying on my skills and abilities to validate if the piece of content produced is up to the mark.”
Looking ahead, experts see continued rapid evolution in the space. Mantripragada describes AI in content production as “a very exciting time for us to be in the space.” GenAI, he says, “is one of those transformational, once-in-a-lifetime technologies, that is revolutionizing every part of our jobs.”
This empowerment of end users, without requiring specialized technical skills, represents the most exciting frontier in AI-powered video and content creation. As Boa, Lavigne and Mantripragada suggest, the technology is evolving at a pace that continues to surprise even industry veterans.
(Note: A version of this piece originally appeared in destination CRM.)
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