Why former CNN president Jeff Zucker is gung-ho about artificial intelligence

MUMBAI: Jeff Zucker is not afraid of the machines. While Guillermo del Toro tells AI to bugger off and creatives across Hollywood quake at the prospect of silicon scriptwriters, the RedBird IMI chief executive is rolling out the welcome mat for artificial intelligence.

“We actually think AI is an opportunity,”  Zucker told the audience  at Content London on Wednesday, his enthusiasm barely contained. Sure, the algorithms won’t capture the backstabbing brilliance of Celebrity Traitors or the raw emotion of Hamnet, he conceded. But slash production costs? Absolutely. “We think it’ll bring down the production costs tremendously.”

The former CNN president and NBCUniversal chief executive was equally bullish about AI’s potential in newsrooms. It won’t be meeting Deep Throat in underground car parks or breaking Watergate-style scoops for Front Office Sports, mind you. But as a tool? “It’s a great opportunity to utilise as well.”
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This puts  Zucker firmly on one side of Hollywood’s great AI schism. Just days earlier, del Toro had accepted his Gotham Awards tribute with a rather more colourful take: “Fuck AI,” the Frankenstein director declared, praising his film as “wilfully made by humans, for humans.”

When asked to predict the entertainment landscape in 2030,  Zucker refused to play fortune teller. “Anybody that pretends to tell you today what the world is going to look like in 2030 is a fool,” he said bluntly. The industry will transform twice over before then, he reckons—as much change in five years as in the past 20.

Still, some constants remain. “People are going to want professionally produced content, and they’re going to want creator-produced content,”  Zucker insisted. “And I think all of that will be helped by AI and I think all of that will be helped by human beings.”

Beyond the AI evangelism, the media titan outlined RedBird IMI’s strategy: quality intellectual property, live events, and sports. “Everybody wants to be a team owner,” he noted, but the real money lies in the “adjacencies”—production, sports-adjacent programming, things that “can’t be disintermediated that easily.”

On the news business,  Zucker struck a grimmer tone. “News is a difficult investment,” he admitted. The business model is “troubled or under assault,” journalism faces relentless attacks, yet “there has never been a more important time for news.” His solution? Forget being a generalist. Go deep, go niche, give people “an edge.”

RedBird IMI, launched in late 2022 with a $1 billion war chest from RedBird Capital and Abu Dhabi’s IMI, has already splashed $1.45 billion on All3Media and taken stakes in Media Res. More consolidation is coming, Zucker predicted, though he coyly sidestepped questions about the Warner Bros Discovery bidding war.

As for his new gig compared to the frantic pace of running CNN? “I have a life,” he said. Though he admitted missing the thick of the action. One can’t have everything—not even with AI’s help.