Discover how leading media, entertainment, & advertising companies are operationalizing AI at scale at the 2026 Data + AI Summit—real use cases, real outcomes, no hype.
by Elena Tesser, Jake LaDuke and Khushboo Beniwal
-As media and entertainment companies navigate audience fragmentation, accelerating content demands, and mounting pressure to prove advertising ROI, unified data and AI are becoming the defining competitive advantage.
-Data + AI Summit 2026 will feature a dedicated Media and Entertainment Industry Experience, including an Industry Forum and breakout sessions featuring leading media and entertainment brands who are leveraging unified data and AI to power audience engagement, advertising optimization, and content production.
-Attendees will explore how Lakebase, Genie, and the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform are helping media organizations accelerate every stage
The media and entertainment industry has never moved faster or faced more complexity. Streaming platforms are proliferating. Audiences are fragmenting. Advertising dollars are more scrutinized than ever. And the pressure to create more content, faster, with higher relevance and lower cost, is relentless.
If you work in media or entertainment, you already know this isn't a future problem. It's the one sitting on your desk right now.
That's exactly why leaders in the space - from media and advertising, to gaming, to sports- should be energized about Data + AI Summit 2026, happening June 15–18 in San Francisco. This year, the industry conversation has shifted decisively from exploring AI to operationalizing it, moving from pilot projects to platforms that power real business outcomes at scale. The media and entertainment leaders who are winning aren't just experimenting with AI. They're building it into the core of how they acquire audiences, monetize their brand and their content, and run their operations.
This year's Media and Entertainment Industry Experience will go deep on what actually works, grounded in real use cases, real outcomes, and real conversations with the leaders driving them.
Wednesday, June 17 | 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM PT | Marriott Marquis, Golden Gate AB
The centerpiece of the industry experience is the Media and Entertainment Industry Forum. The Forum includes a dedicated keynote and executive panel sessions where executives from leading brands and agencies including Fox, Epsilon, Acxiom, 2K, Pacers Sports & Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Discovery will share how data and AI are transforming their businesses.
I'm hosting the Media & Advertising Industry forum at Databricks' Data & AI Summit this year and moderating a panel on personalization with leaders in identity (Acxiom), publishing (Warner Bros. Discovery), gaming (2K) and sports (Pacers Sports & Entertainment). If you are in the business of creating highly meaningful and curated experiences for your audiences and customers, this is the session you cannot miss. You will hear from the best and leave with the playbook.
This isn't a product pitch. It's a conversation between those shaping the media and entertainment landscape about where the industry is today, where it's going, and what separates the organizations making meaningful progress from those still stuck in experimentation mode. Expect frank discussion on:
Whether you're a head of data, a technology leader, a head of advertising, or a media strategist, this forum is where you'll hear the perspectives and proof points that matter most to your role.
If you’re looking to make the most of your time, here are a few of the breakout sessions we’d recommend including in your schedule. Each one features real M&E organizations showing how they've applied data and AI to solve industry-specific problems, in production, at scale, with measurable results.
WMG Tech built a declarative data platform on Databricks combining Iceberg, Unity Catalog, and Lakebase to deliver trustworthy, low-latency data products across a complex, multi-engine environment. If you're thinking about how to build a data mesh that supports AI workloads and operational applications simultaneously, this is the session to catch.
Fox's team solved the cold-start personalization problem at launch of Fox One — their short-form video platform — by using GenAI to bootstrap recommendations from sparse signals, blending it with classical ML in a modular system built on Lakebase for millisecond-level video retrieval. A masterclass in shipping personalization under real-world data constraints.
Louie Kuznia, VP of Data Engineering at NBCUniversal, walks through what drove Peacock's migration off BigQuery to Databricks as data volumes scaled, how it unfolded, and where the platform is taking them next. Essential listening for any media organization navigating a major data infrastructure transition.
Hear from Simon Rice, SVP of Data Products and Technology at Versant Media, SVP of Data Products and Technology, on why his team chose Databricks as their foundational layer and how they’re using it to design an end‑to‑end, AI‑native technology stack that powers the future of their media business.
Learn from MIQ Digital product leaders how they are engineering a production-grade AI agent using Databricks Unity Catalog, Genie workspaces, and MCP integration to transform fragmented intelligence into prescriptive, optimized media plans.
KRAFTON shares how they built scalable AI systems for PUBG anti-cheat by connecting community feedback signals — noisy, multilingual, full of slang — with in-game behavioral data from suspicious players in real time. A sharp look at how one of the world's biggest gaming studios is operationalizing LLM intelligence alongside real-time ML to protect player trust at scale.
Trackhouse Racing went from no data platform to a race-ready data and AI stack in under twelve months with a team of just five developers, turning telemetry, video, and race reports into decisions engineers can act on in hours. The "small team, fast wins" blueprint they'll share is directly applicable to any media or entertainment organization trying to do more with less.
The Industry Lounge is where the conversation continues beyond the sessions. Our team will be running live demos of real Media and Entertainment use cases built on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, including AI-powered audience insights, real-time advertising campaign optimization, personalization engine architectures, and agentic content supply chain workflows. Swing by, meet the team, and see the solutions in action.
If you're already operationalizing AI across your media or entertainment business, Summit is where you sharpen your thinking, benchmark your approach against the industry's best, and find new ideas to bring back to your team. If you're earlier in the journey, it's the fastest way to cut through the noise and learn what actually works — from the practitioners who've done it.
Either way, we want to hear from you. Bring your questions. Bring your challenges. Bring your skeptics.
See you in San Francisco, June 15–18.
Explore the full Media and Entertainment agenda and register now →
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