NAB 2026: AI maturity, interoperability and creator economy dominate

Now the dust has settled on NAB 2026, I thought I’d share my key takeaways from the show.

During the three days I was there, I met around 30 companies for 1:1 meetings to catch up on their new products and what their focus has been over the last 12 months, as well as the broader tech trends emerging in the industry.

During one of these meetings – with Cree8 – I was asked to record a short interview to talk through some of the trends I was seeing while traversing the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Centre. You can see this below.

While it’s tricky to neatly compartmentalise all my conversations at the show into convenient themes, to summarise the points made in the video above, I believe several general themes emerged.

1. We’ve moved on to the next stage of AI

If there’s one thing every company mentioned, regardless of the type of tech or service they offer, it was AI, generative AI and/or agentic AI. But, unlike last year, it didn’t feel like mentions of AI were being shoehorned into conversations because companies felt they should address the elephant in the room. Instead, this year companies were almost universally able to demonstrate the practical implementation of AI in proven workflows that make a positive difference to the end user. Often AI is now providing the triple whammy of creative, time saving and cost saving benefits. Now the challenge is how to differentiate one AI-driven feature from another, as most companies appear to be providing variations on incredibly similar themes with their implementation of AI.

2. Interoperability and common standards

Many of my stand tours at NAB 2026 involved seeing demonstrations of how products and services from one manufacturer worked seamlessly alongside products and services from other manufacturers. This seems like a big leap forward compared to 5-10 years ago when companies seemed a lot more closed off to collaborating with competitors and tended to keep their technology to themselves. Now, it’s all about open standards, interoperability with other products on the market and seamlessly slotting in any product into any workflow, irrespective of the manufacturer. This seems like a sensible move that works to give customers a much wider choice of options when devising workflows to suit their needs. This development has been driven by the adoption of initiatives such as MXL and TAMS.

3. The rise of the influence of content creators

Content creators received regular name checks at NAB 2026 by companies referencing the likely client base for their latest product developments. Rather than just talking about production companies or broadcasters, many say the latest generation of content creators are also becoming valued customers. The focus on this client base was apparent in everything from very cost-effective products allowing you to access and edit your files from anywhere in the world, to pop up studios that enable creators to live stream high quality multicamera productions from almost plug-and-play setups rather than traditional, complex studio builds. The increasing influence of content creators on tech developments in the sector is only likely to increase in the coming years as YouTube continues to dominate the sector.

Jake Bickerton is editorial director of Broadcast Tech and Broadcast Sport