As broadcasters juggle an unprecedented volume of platforms and live content, control rooms are under growing pressure to merge legacy systems with cutting-edge tech. IBC2025 Accelerator Champions ITN, BBC, and Channel 4 set out to address this challenging situation – issuing a call for a purpose-built ecosystem of AI-driven production agents designed to fundamentally reimagine operators’ interaction with technology and, therefore, the future of live production galleries.

Recorded live from IBC2025, episode 11 of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the 2025 IBC Incubator ‘AI Agent Assistants for Live Production’ to find out more.

Inspired by the successful R&D of the 2024 IBC Accelerator named ‘Evolution of the Control Room’, this 2025 project proposed AI-driven production assistants to intelligently integrate into control room workflows and enhance live production through AI-assisted automation.

This ambitious consortium set out to tackle the haphazard amalgamation of legacy systems and evolving tech in today’s control rooms by building a "media-first" POC AI Assistant Director orchestrator. Designed from a suite of a dozen customised AI production agents, this system used natural language and voice interaction to simplify control room workflows and speed up decision-making. This Accelerator Project was then live demoed at IBC2025, where visitors had the chance to see how the technology enabled users to focus on the show, rather than the buttons.

In this episode, Muki Kulhan, Accelerator Lead at IBC, was joined by: Olivier Barnich, Head of Innovation and Architecture in the R&D department of EVS; Kyle Suess, Co-Founder of Amira Labs; and Chris Abbot, CuePilot Specialist at CuePilot.

The executives dive deep under the hood of their open, vendor-agnostic intelligent control room of agent-to-agent AI, to reveal how they created the system and what it means for the humans who run studio galleries.