Will AI Replace Corporate Video Production? What We're Seeing in 2026

Here's what's we're seeing

AI is changing how some video gets made, but what it's mostly doing is filling up the lower end of the market, creating video where there wasn't video before (both good and bad), and damaging brand reputations.

A few things are happening here. People and organizations who were already making worthless fluff will make more and more of it until they're irrelevant. When content becomes a commodity, its value drops to zero.

On the other hand, people and organizations who never had the time or budget to create video now have the tools to make it. We'll see new ideas and creative execution we haven't seen before. It may be deeply uncomfortable that people are making creative without creatives, but it's the only future we're charging headfirst into.

The low end: AI slop is killing the feed

This is the stuff that fills up your Instagram and TikTok feeds. It's uncanny. You watch it and you question your reality. Some of it's funny, but it is, like nearly everything on social media, garbage. Garbage that is being manufactured as garbage. We used to make useful things and let them slowly turn into garbage. Now we're skipping the middleman and making the garbage outright.

Most of this isn't made to give the viewer anything. It's made to "game the robots." We do it a bit too. The robots control our fate online, so what choice do we have?

This is also what most people think of when they hear "AI slop." It's the kind of stuff that gives AI a bad name. We're not AI haters, but we are AI slop haters.

Where AI actually helps: video that never existed before

This is the most interesting part of the AI era. On one end, you have people who think they're Steven Spielberg because they can tell an AI they'd love to make a movie about a killer robot, and AI makes it for them. On the other, you have people with great ideas, or who can teach the public things they might not otherwise know, who can now communicate through a medium that used to be off-limits to them. Personally, I've watched countless videos explaining a complex technical, scientific or historical concept that I know were made entirely by AI. I certainly wish we lived in a perfect world where that person could get a studio budget and hire artists and writers, but I'm also glad I live in a time when I'm getting complex ideas explained to me that I wouldn't have before.

It's also a game changer for small businesses. Before, you were limited by the budget, time and talent you had on staff. You may be the best at what you do, but you simply don't have the budget, time or know-how to market it to the world. AI can give small businesses the knowledge, the ability and the resources to create and share marketing content like a much larger team. Once again, it's an ethical trade-off. They're creating things without paying creators. But isn't there something worthwhile about smaller businesses being able to keep up with larger enterprises that offer a worse product or service?

Big brands chasing the gadget

Sometimes large brands chase the cool gadget and get entirely out of touch with what their customers value about them. I don't want to name anybody specifically, but I know a brand that rhymes with Boca Mola, and a certain nationwide bank, that have recently put fully AI-generated ads, some with realistic AI-generated people, in their national TV campaigns. Everyone who sees those without knowing they're AI gets the heebie-jeebies, and everyone who knows just thinks "gross." (The soft drink's AI holiday ads got roasted for exactly that.)

If you have the budget and the brand recognition to hire amazing, talented artists to create your advertising and you don't, shame on you. These companies have lost sight of what their role is and what their customers want. A race to the bottom is a race to find the first loser. No one should enter it.

And that's a soft drink. Now imagine a bank putting an AI "customer" in a testimonial.

Where AI can't go in corporate video

Here's where it matters for B2B. The corporate video our clients hire us for depends on something AI can't fake: it really happened, and it's really them.

• Customer testimonials. A testimonial is only worth something because a real customer said it. The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials, in effect since October 2024, bans testimonials from people who don't exist, including ones made with AI. So an AI "customer" isn't just cringey, it's a legal problem. Here's how we approach customer testimonial videos.
• Events. The keynote happened once, live, in a room full of people. You can't prompt your way into footage of it. That's why event video still needs a crew in the room.
• Executive and employee interviews. The whole point is that it's really your CEO, your engineer or your advisor. An AI version is a trust problem, and in finance and insurance it's a compliance problem too.

AI can help around the edges of all three, in the edit. It can't stand in for the people.

How we use AI at Lightswitch (and where we won't)

We're careful with AI in our creative work. In production, we avoid it as much as possible. Here's where it does show up:

• Small technical fixes. Correcting an eye line in an interview, or extending a clip by a second or two (sometimes just a few frames) so an edit lands cleanly.
• The occasional image. We've generated a few images for our videos, but only after we'd run out of real or licensable options.
• Scratch voiceovers. We use AI voices to get a video's timing right before we pay a voiceover artist to do the real thing.
• Better starting points for editors. We've written about tools that create derivative content from a longer video. We always pick tools that give our editors a better starting point over tools that make the whole piece themselves.
• Clip tagging (pilot). We're piloting a program that uses AI to tag our clips so raw footage is easier to find. This used to be an intern going clip by clip, tagging what they saw. I don't think anybody's sad about losing that job.

That's the kind of job we want AI doing: behind the scenes, saving time, so our people can focus on the interview, the story and the brand. What we won't do is generate the people on camera or put words in their mouths.

So, will AI kill the video star?

No, no, it won't. It will change how some of the content is made. It will separate the losers from the winners, and it will give real creators new tools to make things they never could before. What we do at Lightswitch depends on real people telling real stories, recorded in front of a real camera. I believe wholeheartedly that humans telling their stories will never be replaced by uncanny-valley facsimiles created by AI. So when people ask me if I'm sweating the AI era, I say, "Absolutely not."

To be clear, we're also one of those small businesses using AI in our marketing to get ahead. We use it to market our work and take busywork off our team, never to replace the people in front of or behind the camera. We are the best at what we do, with seven Telly Awards and an Emmy to back it up, and we finally have the tools to let people know it.

FAQ

Will AI replace corporate video production?

No. AI is taking over high-volume, low-stakes content. Corporate video built on real employees, leaders and customers is getting more valuable, because buyers can tell the difference and trust the real thing.

Will AI replace videographers?

Not for corporate work. Someone still has to be in the room for the interview, the keynote or the plant tour. AI is changing the edit far more than the shoot.

Can AI make customer testimonial videos?

It can make something that looks like one, but it isn't one. The FTC's rule bans testimonials from people who don't exist, including AI-made ones, and buyers tune out the fakes anyway. AI can help in the edit, but the customer has to be real.

Does Lightswitch use AI?

Sparingly, and never for the people on camera. We use it for small technical fixes like eye-line correction or extending a clip by a few frames, and for scratch voiceovers. We're also piloting AI clip tagging so raw footage is easier to find.

Is AI-generated video bad for B2B brands?

When it replaces the real people and stories buyers want to see, yes. It blends into the noise and can cost you trust. Used behind the scenes to speed up the edit, it's fine.