Microsoft Ignite 2025 sends a clear message to Media & Entertainment: AI is no longer a side project. It is becoming the operating system for how content is created, moved, and monetised. And for most studios, broadcasters, sports leagues, and agencies, that operating system is already in place, it’s your Microsoft estate.
This article looks at what Microsoft Ignite 2025 really means for media and entertainment companies, and how you can turn your existing Microsoft investment into measurable AI outcomes with Support Partners, AIR Fusion, AIR Spaces and Catalyst.
You’ve spent years hardening Azure, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and your security posture. The real strategic question is no longer “Which new AI stack should we buy?”
It’s: “Why would we invest in a whole new stack when we’ve already invested in Microsoft – and how fast can we unlock the value that’s sitting there?”
Support Partners sits squarely in that space. We built our own platforms AIR Fusion and AIR Spaces on Azure, and through Catalyst we work with media organisations worldwide to turn Ignite-era capabilities into real outcomes in promos, live sport, post, news, archives and campaigns. We’ve done this from the inside as content creators, creative operators, media innovation leaders, CTOs and CFOs. Now we do it as your Microsoft media AI consulting partner.
The Microsoft–IDC study launched with Ignite shows an AI landscape that’s splitting into leaders and everyone else. Frontier firms – the AI-first organisations – are seeing 2.84x returns on their AI investments; laggards are stuck at 0.84x. Only 22% of organisations qualify as Frontier firms today.
Across all industries, 68% of organisations already use generative AI, with another 26% planning to do so within the next 12 months. Those using GenAI report an average 2.8x ROI with a 15-month payback. Agentic AI – AI systems that can plan, reason and act – is already delivering an average 2.3x ROI with a 13-month payback.
Media & Entertainment is behind that curve. Our sector reports the lowest GenAI ROI of any industry at around 2.3x, and only 6% of media organisations qualify as Frontier firms.
That sounds like a problem. In reality, it’s a window. There is still a genuine first-mover advantage for media and sports organisations that decide to industrialise AI now, on the platform they already own, instead of waiting for a “perfect” point solution while others quietly move ahead.
If you are a serious media or sports business, you already have:
Many of the organisations we work use other cloud providers for media infrastructure but “Microsoft-first” for identity, collaboration and security. That’s not a conflict, it’s an advantage. We don’t ask you to rip out what you’ve built on those clouds; we use your Microsoft 365 and Azure investment as the AI and workflow layer on top of it, with AIR Fusion unifying data from both worlds and AIR Spaces providing secure creative desktops that can reach into AWS, Azure and on-prem resources alike – all powered by Microsoft’s evolving AI and data platform.
Ignite 2025 builds on that foundation rather than replacing it. The IDC study shows that over 70% of organisations plan to increase AI spending over the next 24 months, with nearly 40% expecting to grow AI budgets by up to 19%. The opportunity is not to add yet another island of technology; it is to get more from the stack you have.
We see this clearly with a global news organisation we work with. Their journalists and producers operate across time zones, with unpredictable spikes as stories break. Instead of buying a separate VDI stack, they chose AIR Spaces on Azure Virtual Desktop. That lets them scale secure desktops up and down with the global news cycle, all inside their existing Microsoft tenant, identity and security posture. No new login system. No fresh firewall debates. Just more value from what was already in place – and the ability to respond to the news cycle without compromising security or user experience.
At Ignite, Microsoft also continued to invest in its data platform story, including enhancements to help AI and agents reason over “all your data” more effectively. You don’t need to become a data platform expert to benefit from that; the point is that the Microsoft stack you own is becoming more AI-ready under the hood.
Support Partners’ stance is simple: the fastest, safest route to AI ROI in Media & Entertainment is not a brand-new stack. It’s turning your existing Microsoft platform into an AI-ready operating layer, and using AIR Fusion and AIR Spaces to make that layer usable for creative, operations and commercial teams.
Ignite 2025 and the IDC research both highlight the rise of agentic AI: systems made up of one or more AI agents that can reason, plan and act across applications and data with human oversight. Frontier firms are already applying agents across multiple business functions, not just in a single app.
Across all respondents, 37% of organisations already use agentic AI, 25% are experimenting, and 24% plan to use it in the next 24 months. This is not a side-show; it is becoming the control layer for work. Ignite’s Book of News and related announcements reinforce this with things like Agent 365 as a control plane for AI agents. Microsoft is also adding new capabilities to its AI platform so agents can connect to real-time business events and enterprise data with proper observability and governance.
For Media & Entertainment, the real question is not “Should we use agents?” It is “Where do those agents live – and what data do they trust?”
AIR Fusion is our answer to the data side of that question. We built it as a media-native intelligence and data layer on Azure that can:
Two current projects show what this looks like when you keep everything inside the Microsoft ecosystem.
For a major episodic content network, we are building an AI synopsis engine on Azure that ingests full episodes, understands structure and narrative, and generates multiple synopsis variants – short, long, different tones, ready for OTT catalogues and marketing. Agents run within their Microsoft environment, working over a normalised view of episodes, seasons, entities and rights captured in AIR Fusion. Editorial stays in control, but the heavy lifting is handled by a “digital crew” that knows their content, brand and rules. The outcome: faster time-to-publish and more consistent presentation across platforms without adding headcount.
For a leading sports league, we are designing an agent workflow that monitors telemetry from the digital distribution layer, bitrates, error codes, edge logs, and automatically surfaces probable faults. The goal is simple: detect and resolve issues faster so streams get back on screen sooner, without asking humans to stare at dashboards all day. Agents live in the Microsoft environment and reason over structured views of events, feeds and delivery paths, so operations teams can focus on decisions, not data hunting.
For AI to matter in Media & Entertainment, it has to show up where the work happens: in the edit, in the gallery, in the stadium, in the marketing war room and in the archive. Ignite 2025 reinforced that the cloud is being reshaped underneath us to support exactly that, without asking you to rebuild from scratch.
On the compute side, Azure now offers serverless GPUs in Azure Container Apps, well suited to bursty workloads like speech-to-text, translation, tagging, thumbnailing and exploratory text-to-image. You can scale to zero and pay per second instead of keeping GPU VMs warm “just in case”. This is perfect for the smaller AI helpers inside AIR Fusion, the tools that make editorial and operations work faster without needing a permanent farm.
On the storage side, Smart Tier for Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage introduces automatic account-level tiering between hot and cool, based on real access patterns. In media terms: rushes, VFX plates, works-in-progress and key AI outputs can live hot during production and launch, then cool down automatically as activity drops. AI “exhaust” – transcripts, alt cuts, previews, embeddings, QC artefacts – can be kept affordable but instantly usable when AIR Fusion pipelines or agents need them.
And then there is hybrid. With Azure Local and GPU support, you can run low-latency AI and VDI in facilities, stadiums and production hubs, with the same identity, security and policy as the cloud. That means tasks like live clipping, logo detection, ad verification and near-set QC no longer require separate stacks or one-off vendors; they become extensions of the Azure platform you already own.
In a studio environment, we are helping a content group spin up multi-agent AI resources on demand for VFX plate processing, rig removal and upscaling. GPU capacity sits on Azure (and where needed, Azure Local). AIR Fusion coordinates what gets processed when, and Smart Tier ensures the flood of intermediate outputs does not overwhelm storage budgets. The result is more experimentation and higher-quality output, at scale without blowing up cost.
For a European broadcast group, AIR Fusion is being used to deeply understand decades of archive content – shots, talent, locations, brands – and connect that understanding to rights and schedules. Under the hood, Azure AI and tiered storage make this feasible. For editors and promo producers, the experience simply becomes “I can finally find what I need, and discover things I had forgotten existed,” which in turn drives more re-use of existing assets and reduces unnecessary re-shoots and licensing.
For a global sports rights holder, we are exploring AI-driven second-screen experiences powered by AIR Fusion as the content platform both in Azure and at the edge using Azure Local. Multi-agent workflows run close to the venue to keep latency low, feeding highlights, stats and contextual stories into second-screen apps in real time, while identity, governance and data stay inside their Microsoft environment. The payoff is richer fan engagement without creating yet another disconnected tech stack.
The IDC study is clear on where most organisations are stuck. The biggest blockers to scaling AI are not models or APIs, but security, privacy, governance and compliance – nearly 30% of organisations cite these as top challenges. At the same time, almost 40% plan to increase AI spending by up to 19% over the next 24 months.
You don’t fix that by adding more tools. You fix it by putting an AI operating model on top of the stack you already trust – Microsoft – and extending that platform with media-specific capabilities and a normalised data layer that AI and agents can rely on.
That operating model answers questions like:
Frontier firms integrate human expertise, data, technology and governance into a system for repeatedly generating value from AI, not just productivity boosts. They are also moving towards customised AI: customised GenAI solutions are expected to rise sharply, and use of agentic AI is set to triple over the next two years.
Support Partners’ Catalyst professional services are built to design that operating model with you. We start with the Microsoft estate you already have, the creative and operational reality you live in, and the Ignite-era capabilities now available in Azure and the broader Microsoft data platform. Then we design a path that uses:
Ignite 2025 makes one thing very clear: the organisations that will lead the next decade of Media & Entertainment won’t necessarily be those that buy the most AI logos. They will be the ones that look at their existing Microsoft investment and decide to treat it as their AI platform – then move decisively to build on it.
The IDC data shows that Frontier firms are already seeing superior ROI, stronger brand differentiation, better customer experience and more efficient operations. Media is behind, but the runway for first movers is still wide open.
Support Partners is built to help you close that gap without blowing up the foundations you’ve already laid. We understand your world because we’ve worked in it. We understand Microsoft because we build on it every day. And we understand that AI only matters if it improves how you commission, produce, package, deliver and monetise content.
So the real question is not “Should we invest in AI?” It’s this: why would you invest in an entirely new tech stack, with new risk and new complexity, when you already have Microsoft – and a partner who can help you turn it into your competitive advantage?
If you’re ready to move from scattered pilots to measurable outcomes on the platform you already own, a focused #Catalyst engagement around one or two high-impact journeys is the best place to start. From there, #AIR Fusion, #AIR Spaces and #Azure can become the backbone of a media operation that is faster, smarter, more resilient – and ready for whatever Microsoft announces next.