NAB spotlights upstream AI tooling

At the National Association of Broadcasters Show next week, vendors are pitching artificial intelligence before editors even open Adobe Premiere Pro or another timeline tool. (nabshow.com) The National Association of Broadcasters Show runs April 18-22, 2026, in Las Vegas, with exhibits open April 19-22. The trade group said this year’s show adds a second artificial intelligence pavilion on the floor. (nabshow.com 1) (nabshow.com 2) Cutback said it will debut a product called Selects at Booth N961 in the North Hall, with daily demos and a Tech Chat Theatre session scheduled for Sunday, April 19, at 1:40 p.m. The company said the system turns raw multi-camera footage into a structured rough cut before handoff to Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve. (abnewswire.com) (cutback.video) In video production, that early stage usually means logging clips, syncing cameras, reading transcripts, and pulling promising moments before the creative edit starts. Cutback said Selects is aimed at that sorting and review work, which its product page describes as the initial 70% of editing. (cutback.video) (abnewswire.com) BRAHMA AI said it will exhibit at Booth W2415 in the West Hall with an enterprise platform built for ingestion, tagging, search, repurposing, and localization across media, sports, and technology organizations. Sports Video Group reported the company is targeting archive organization, faster content discovery, and new content creation through automated agents and workflows. (sportsvideo.org) (brahma.io) BRAHMA AI is backed by Prime Focus Limited, and Prime Focus said on March 11 that BRAHMA AI had entered a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud around multilingual digital humans for enterprise communication. That places the company’s National Association of Broadcasters pitch inside a broader push to sell artificial intelligence tooling to large media and corporate customers, not only post-production teams. (primefocus.com) (sportsvideo.org) Wowza said it will show live demonstrations in Meeting Room W2674 focused on artificial intelligence-driven operations, workflow automation, observability, and newer delivery architectures. TVNewsCheck reported the company is framing those demos around live video systems that can support artificial intelligence workloads without forcing customers to rebuild core infrastructure. (tvnewscheck.com) (info.wowza.com) The common thread is where the software sits. Instead of selling artificial intelligence as a button inside the edit, these companies are selling it as the layer that ingests footage, labels it, drafts it, routes it, and prepares it for people to finish. (cutback.video) (sportsvideo.org) (tvnewscheck.com) That pitch fits the direction of the 2026 show itself. National Association of Broadcasters said artificial intelligence has moved from experimentation to practical use across the media workflow, and the floor in Las Vegas now reflects that shift upstream, before the final edit and before distribution. (nabshow.com)