IBC Accelerators triumph with Best AI Innovation at Broadcast Tech Awards

At a celebratory gala Awards dinner held at The Brewery, London, on 27 November 2025, 450 attendees heard that the project was recognised because it “totally transforms how people and AI work together.”

Commenting on the win, Muki Kulhan, IBC Accelerators Lead, said: “This diverse and talented IBC Accelerator project team of global broadcasters and technology vendors went above and beyond what true collaboration looks like, sharing skills, resources, and most of all, the hunger and curiosity for R&D innovation that developed more than just a proof of concept with agentic and intelligent workflows in live production, but a progressive, forward-thinking approach to the future of all productions. We are so proud of this team and can't wait to see what they get up to next!”

At the outset of the project, Morag McIntosh, Solution Lead for Live Production Control at the BBC, explained the problem at hand: “We’ve presented the operators with a bunch of hardware to interact with. A touch screen, a keyboard, a mouse, often many multiple screens, something with the news screen system, something with the automation system, and then, of course, the monitor stack itself. We're forcing our operators to interact with this kit, which means they're always looking down. We've got this symptom that we call at the BBC ‘helicopter hands,’ where they can't find the shortcut they need, when they need it quickly. they're kind of circling all these different options for the UI to crash something to air because it's urgent and it needs to get there.”

Jon Roberts, CTO of ITN, added that, despite impressive advances, traditional automation systems often rely on rigid templates rather than true intelligence. “We could get to a place where what we’ve considered automation systems in the last 10 or 15 years, which have achieved remarkable capabilities, might look quite primitive because they’re quite reductive,” he warned.

To address these challenges, this Accelerator set out to intelligently integrate AI-driven production assistants into control room workflows and enhance live production through AI-assisted automation.

As a result, this POC achieved a live gallery with a customised, voice-controlled AI Assistant Director. 

Built as a new, open, vendor-agnostic framework, it used Google-supported Gemini integrations for ADK, A2A, and MCP to demonstrate voice-first interaction and become the ‘orchestrator agent’ that coordinated and supervised all agent workflows. 

This enabled the AI Assistant Director to run an end-to-end live news broadcast demo by integrating with the full cast of bespoke agents custom-built to enable Audio, Automation, Checking, Content Discovery, GFX, Music Automation, Rundown, TX, and Video Enhancement. 

Demonstrated at IBC2025 in Amsterdam, the POC created a new framework of dedicated, strategic AI Agent assistants that all worked together to reduce complexity, speed up decision-making, maintain quality, protect trust, and understand and act on live TV production needs, with an emphasis on human augmentation rather than replacement and integration.

Project champions included ITN, BBC and Channel 4, with participants CUEZ, Amira Labs, Highfield-AI, Monks, CuePilot, Shure, EVS, Moments Lab and Google Cloud.

IBC is currently accepting submissions for the 2026 Accelerator Media Innovation Programme, with a deadline of Friday 5 December at 5pm (GMT). IBC will select up to 12 challenge submissions to move on to the next round of on-stage pitches at its Kickstart Day event, which will take place at the BBC Radio Theatre in BBC Broadcasting House on Wednesday 25 February 2026. 

Other Broadcast Tech Innovation Awards 2025 winners revealed on the night included:

Best AI Innovation (Creative)

Killer Kings (FirstLookTV)

 

Excellence in Audio Post-Production (Non-Scripted)

Gary Kelly, Michal Maletz & Daniel Nolan of Splice Post (Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy)

 

Best Innovative Use of Cloud

Next-generation News Distribution Powered by TAMS on AWS (Reuters, Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit and AWS)

 

Excellence in Grading (Non-Scripted) sponsored by EIZO

Daniel Gill of Picture Shop Bristol (Our Oceans)

 

Best Sustainability Project sponsored by Appear

Measuring Post-Production Carbon Emissions (Cut the Carbon & Clear Cut)

 

Best Use of Archive sponsored by Moments Lab

In the Veins (Yorkshire and North East Film Archive for YouTube)

 

Excellence in VFX sponsored by ERA

Rob Harvey, Sam Reed, He Sun, Cesar Nunes of Lola Post (Walking with Dinosaurs)

 

Best Use of Graphics

E1 Series AR/VR Graphics (Aurora for 30+ international broadcast partners)

 

Best Tech Innovation in Live Production sponsored by CVP

BBC Radio 1’s Big Virtual Weekend

 

Best Industry Skills Initiative sponsored by Gravity Media

All Set West

 

Young Talent of the Year (Live Production) sponsored by Netflix

Federico Favretto, Production Specialist at BBC News

 

Young Talent of the Year (Technical) sponsored by Netflix

Signija Gutmane (Sunset+Vine)

 

Young Talent of the Year (Post-Production) sponsored by Netflix

Dan Bland (Aurora)

 

Best Innovation Project

BBC Live Immersive (BBC R&D in partnership with Condense) 

 

Excellence in Grading (Scripted) sponsored by EIZO

Kevin Horsewood of UNIT (The Bombing of Pan Am 103)

 

Post Producer of the Year sponsored by Serious

Dave O’Callaghan (Residence Pictures)

 

Excellence in Audio Post-Production (Scripted)

Jules Woods & James Drake of Splice Post (Adolescence)

 

Standout Tech of the Year (Production) sponsored by Medialease

Samsung Virtual Production LED Volume (Quite Brilliant / Twickenham Film Studios)

 

Standout Tech of the Year (Post-Production)

tanooki

 

Tech Team of the Year sponsored by BBC Studioworks

Applied Technology Team (Dimension Studio)

 

At IBC2025, the AI Agent Assistants for Live Production Accelerator conducted live demonstrations of their working AI agentic system to showcase real time, AI agent to agent workflows and tasks for a live studio gallery. This included live demos both on stage during the Final Showcase Session and at the Accelerator Zone. Discover more here.