Top AGBO execs Chris Brearton and Dominic Hughes delivered a keynote discussion at TIFFCOM, the content market of the Tokyo International Film Festival, on Thursday, about how AI is impacting filmmaking, how it can be used to assist rather than replace human creators and how it will shape the future of visual content creation.
Brearton is a partner and business leader at AGBO, while Hughes is the company’s chief scientific officer and technology leader.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, AGBO focuses on producing cross-platform entertainment properties, including such films as “Extraction” (2020), “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022), “The Gray Man” (2022), “Extraction 2” (2023) and “The Electric State” (2025).
Brearton noted that early in their careers, AGBO founders Anthony and Joe Russo were working on the Emmy-winning comedy hit “Arrested Development” when they received a script for the show that would ordinarily be too long and expensive to produce. Instead of giving it a pass, they used digital cameras and editing to make it a reality. “They looked at technology as a solution that empowered them to tell the story they wanted to tell,” said Brearton. And that way of thinking is now in the corporate DNA of AGBO.
Another inspiration for AGBO’s business philosophy, Brearton added, was Walt Disney, who brought Disney characters to life in another medium – the theme park – for the enjoyment of fans. “In 2026 we are using technology to build a virtual theme park, a virtual community bringing people together,” he said.
AGBO also recognizes that “creative artists are special,” Brearton added: “Humans are uniquely positioned to tell stories. The way we embrace technology is all about artists and putting artists first.”
Hughes used the example of Pixar, which evolved technology around 3D rendering. “But technology was not sufficient on its own,” he said. “They used it to tell incredible stories. Technology played a supporting role. That’s how we think about these things at AGBO.”
Hughes, who has a strong academic background in algorithms and machine learning, described being an ardent fan of Disney cartoons as a child and spending his teenage years “going down the rabbit hole” of 3D rendering and video game creation. He also had a musical talent, playing cello for orchestras.
This creative side, Hughes said, has found an outlet in his career at what he calls “the intersection of media and technology.” His background informs his belief that, in creative fields, “you have to have a human that’s sitting on top and curating to make sure the algorithms are not running on their own.” At AGBO, he said, his role “is really about supporting artists to be more and more creative.”
Brearton added that AGBO wants to make sure the artists and creatives feel comfortable. “At our LA studio you’ll see our technologists and our creatives really sitting side by side, working together,” he said.
But excitement about what AI can do in supporting content creation is accompanied by anxiety about an AI-dominated future. Brearton responded that “there is a lot of misinformation” about AI’s role.
“There’s a concern that it’s going to replace us all,” he said. But what makes a favorite performance by a favorite actor special, he added, “is the human element” that AI cannot equal. “AI is really going to be more impactful, particularly in the midterm, in process efficiencies,” he said.
That is, using AI to fix problems and do work that slows and impedes the creative process. “We really think it’s an empowerment,” said Brearton. Instead of replacing artists, Hughes added, AI is “making them better storytellers.” With AI, he explained, “you can handle all the annoying things that keep you from enjoying yourself [as a creator].”
Also, the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) does not mean the doom of creative artists, Hughes said. Instead, “people who are at the pinnacle of their arts” – the Brahmses and Beethovens – cannot be replicated by a machine, no matter how smart. At AGBO, he said, “the technologists are helping creatives build tools” that enhance their creativity and increase their productivity, not take their jobs.
AI, Hughes noted, is good at “regurgitating what has been done in the past,” but not good at creating something from scratch. “Machines don’t have the creativity required for that degree of novelty,” he said.
AI, however, “is good at critiquing,” Hughes observed. AI can tell you whether a play someone discovered in an attic might have been written by Shakespeare, but if you ask it to write its own Shakespeare play, “you’d have the sense that it was written by a 12-year-old,” he said.
Another example of how AI can support the creative process is scriptwriting. “If you’re struggling a little bit with a character in the third act, it can provide data,” Brearton said. “Not a solution, but data.”
AI can also help “democratize storytelling,” Brearton noted: “We’ll see new filmmakers making movies that otherwise you wouldn’t have seen” because AI has helped them achieve their vision on a budget they can afford.
At the same time, Hughes added, AI can generate endless amounts of mediocre content, “but consumers can’t possibly absorb it.” The only solution, he said, is “to raise the bar on quality,” adding, “I’m very excited about where that high quality is going to lead.”
But won’t AI replace the humans doing work beneath the highest creative levels? The people making the stage backdrops for the Mozarts? Not necessarily, said Hughes: “If you want to produce something for the ages, you need many humans involved in that loop.”
There is also the concern that AI strip-mines content without compensating its creators. But at AGBO, Brearton said, “We track every single tool and every single usage of every single tool. We’re very comprehensive about copyright and the paper trail of who did what … You have to be intentional about this. This is not ‘let’s do something on the fly.’”
The future of entertainment, Brearton said, is “concurrence.” He used the example of his son, who consumes several different media at once on his various devices. “There are four or five different sources coming into him,” he said. “That’s different from the way I would consume entertainment, but that’s the future.”
Those supplying that entertainment, he added, must have “the ability to build worlds that tell stories across all of those platforms concurrently and provide quality entertainment to that fan across those screens at the same time in a genuine way.”
“And underlying all that, you still have to create incredible stories with wonderful characters in a rich world to live in,” he said.
The keynote was moderated by Variety‘s Asia Editor Naman Ramachandran.
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