Many of the 140,000 people expected to attend CES 2025 in Las Vegas (Jan. 7-10) will come just to browse the 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space, crammed with the latest innovations in everything from bird feeders and prosthetic limbs to automotive OLED displays. But for those eager to find out what’s coming next in the ongoing evolution of the entertainment-tech convergence, the highlight is likely to be the Variety Entertainment Summit on Jan. 8 at the Aria Resort & Casino.
“The Variety Summit is a great opportunity at CES for people to look ahead, as opposed to some of the other things we do, which is acknowledging some of the successes and giving people their flowers, which is great,” says Jay Tucker, executive director of the Center for Media, Entertainment and Sports at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, who’ll be moderating the “Succeeding With AI and Entertainment” panel.
The panels will feature a cross section of execs from media and tech companies including Amazon, Crunchyroll, Meta, NBCUniversal, Netflix, OnlyFans, Reddit and Walt Disney Studios, as well as Sphere Entertainment, which is responsible for the giant LED orb than dominates the city’s skyline. There will also be a trio of “headliner conversations” with Grammy-winning musician and FYI founder and CEO will.i.am, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and new Sony Pictures Entertainment president and CEO Ravi Ahuja.
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The “Fans, Creators and Marketers — Unite!” panel will include Tim Clark, chief brand officer of motorsports giant NASCAR, which is cultivating future live-racing fans by collaborating with Roblox, Fortnite and Rocket League on in-game content.
“Your entry to a sport like NASCAR used to be watching it on television with your dad. Now, it could be through a video game,” says Clark. While he doesn’t foresee these integrations triggering huge increases in NASCAR fans overnight, he’s “already seeing some of the benefits.”
In recent months, most of the speculation in the entertainment tech space has concerned artificial intelligence, which is alternately seen as an existential threat and a time-saving creative tool so transformative that it borders on magic.
“Artificial intelligence is on an exponential improvement curve that is very hard for humans to comprehend,” says Tucker. However, “if you want artificial intelligence to actually create value, you not only have to figure out the places where it might be helpful, you have to then integrate it in a strategic way.”
Fox chief technical officer Melody Hildebrandt, who’ll be on the AI panel moderated by Tucker, says it’s important that studios avoid the mistakes they made during the social media revolution, when they tailored their strategies to big tech’s platforms and wound up being at the mercy of their ever-changing business models and algorithms.
“We now have some of the best technologists in the world at Hollywood studios, so we don’t need to cede architectural ground entirely,” she says. And while she’s very enthusiastic about partnering with AI companies, “if we do a content licensing deal, we expect our data to go through certain paths that allow us to have a traceable audit trail.”
The WGA and SAG-AFTRA set some guardrails for AI in their latest studio contracts, but the legal framework for the technology is still underdeveloped, leaving both creatives and corporations vulnerable.
“Even if you suppose that every elected official is an expert in AI, it would still be difficult to pass legislation and to set up a regulatory environment,” says Tucker. “So I think it’s going to be challenging to make sure that we have rules of the game to ensure the best outcomes for the stakeholders.”