Industrial Research Unit · Straits Institute for Applied AI
Applied AI in Media, Telecom & Entertainment
36 entries on the record in media, telecom & entertainment — 28 deployments, 3 pieces of evidence of impact, 3 regulations, 2 pieces of evidence of adoption. Each one is traced to a named source and dated. Maintained continuously by the Industrial Research Unit; the record was last updated 14 Sep 2026.
Entries
36
Countries
29
Most recent
9 Sep 2026
Kind
Country
Role
36 entries
Evidence of adoptionMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentYemen9 Sep 2026
57% of Yemeni investigative journalists use AI at work
University of Aden — Dr Sahar Muhammad Ahmad Ali, assistant professor at the Faculty of Media, University of Aden, puts AI in investigative journalism at 57% among Yemeni practitioners, from a digital questionnaire answered by 30 reporters. Dependence rates as middling for 53%, with hunting down information and checking facts the top applications and ChatGPT the favoured tool. Barriers to AI-assisted reporting: poor instruction, at 93%, and frail digital infrastructure, at 86%.
RTL Hungary makes a prime-time show intro with AI in half a day
RTL Hungary — RTL Hungary assembled the opening of its 'A legjobb ajánlat' second-season intro through AI video production, wrapping it inside half a day. Creative director Verebély Marcell put the choice down to a David Lynch-styled promo whose surrounding imagery resisted conventional filming; the team worked it up during April. Generative editing tools also salvaged murky, washed-out January footage.
KT — KT now runs AI stadium operations daily at Suwon KT Wiz Park, from facial-recognition entry and synthetic-voice announcements to motion-recognition fan cameras and live translation for foreign spectators. KT says entry, previously 50 to 60 seconds a person with bag checks, is about 30 seconds faster, more than halving delays. Foreign spectators' attendance share rose 57% in the first half against a year earlier after translation launched.
T-Mobile cuts Czech live-chat handling by up to 28 minutes with AI
T-Mobile Czech Republic — T-Mobile has cut AI customer support resolution times in Czechia by up to 28 minutes per live-chat request, using the Sprinklr platform and its AI assistant, versus roughly 80 first-quarter users. Over 500 staff now access the tool, which surfaces information and drafts replies. This marks a scale-up in AI-assisted customer service, though the savings figures are not independently verified.
Broadcast Solutions runs the Supercup on automated AI cameras
Broadcast Solutions — Broadcast Solutions produced the inaugural Franz Beckenbauer Supercup's tactical feed with automated camera production systems from Studio Automated, plus Egripment equipment. The company says the systems delivered the tactical coverage but gave no detail on the automation behind it.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentUnited States29 Aug 2026
The Washington Post builds AI agents to query its internal data
The Washington Post — The Washington Post has built AI agents on ChatGPT and OpenAI's APIs that answer recurring advertising, subscription and content questions from its internal datasets, within permission rules. Cross-dataset lookups become an on-demand assistant, leaving analysts free for judgement, per a trade-news summary with no scale figures or named sources.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentUnited Kingdom27 Aug 2026
WPP and Omnicom become first agency partners for ChatGPT Ads in India
WPP & Omnicom — WPP and Omnicom are the first agency partners for OpenAI's ChatGPT Ads in India, covering strategy, creative work, campaign execution, measurement and brand safety. OpenAI says the deal is non-exclusive, that over 50 brands planned to advertise on ChatGPT there in launch week, and that self-serve access follows in early September.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentCuraçao27 Aug 2026
Curaçao Innovation Hub's all-AI film places second worldwide
Curaçao Innovation Hub — Curaçao Innovation Hub placed second worldwide at the SparkVision AI Film Festival 2026, a contest open only to work made 100 percent with artificial intelligence. The Ministry of Economic Development (MEO) released the placing, casting the hub's AI filmmaking as what emerging technology and innovation yield beside Curaçao's culture, language, identity and local talent, and as proof the island can compete internationally in fast-moving technological and creative industries. Makers of the AI-generated short film say the point was to let people see and feel a possible island future, one now waiting to be built.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentUnited States26 Aug 2026
Verizon deploys Google's Gemini across customer service and network operations
Verizon — Verizon has deployed Google Cloud's Gemini AI across marketing, network operations and customer service. In some channels Gemini handles most inbound consumer calls and chats, diagnosing issues and passing complex cases to staff; AI agents patch and re-route network systems automatically via programmatic access. Financial terms, timelines and figures went undisclosed.
Evidence of impactMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentJamaica21 Aug 2026
Digicel's AI assistant resolves 55% of Jamaican customer interactions unaided
Digicel — Digicel's AI customer care assistant Ruby has handled 55% of more than 535,000 conversations in Jamaica without a human agent, the telecoms group's 2026 Sustainability Report says. Built on Canadian firm Ada's platform, the virtual assistant takes routine jobs such as bill payment, plan activation and balance checks across voice, web, WhatsApp and the MyDigicel app, supporting care teams without replacing them, says Digicel.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentNigeria14 Aug 2026
Nigerian journalists get an AI line to report election attacks
International Press Centre — The International Press Centre piloted WAFLO, a WhatsApp-based AI election incident reporting system, during the Osun State governorship election. Journalists on duty logged harassment, intimidation, assaults, threats and other press freedom violations live over the WhatsApp line for monitoring and documentation. It runs under Component 4 of the European Union Support to Democratic Governance in Nigeria Phase Two programme, with the Centre for Media and Society.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentSpain12 Aug 2026
Telefónica embeds generative AI in its Spanish business phone services
Telefónica — Telefónica has built generative AI into its business voice services in Spain as 'Centrex AI', across corporate mobile lines and Centrex IP and Centrex 365 virtual PBX products. Features include speaker-labelled, near real-time call transcripts, AI summaries and virtual agents that check records and book appointments, in 100-plus languages. Spanish firms and public administrations come first.
TelevisaUnivision dubs telenovelas into Portuguese and Korean with AI
TelevisaUnivision — TelevisaUnivision confirms it already uses AI dubbing on part of its catalogue to take productions faster into markets where Spanish is not the main language. It works with ElevenLabs and other specialists whose voice replication translates into Portuguese, Korean and more far quicker than conventional dubbing.
Bell launches AI-based detection to block spoofed calls for customers
Bell — Bell has launched AI-based 'Suspicious Call Detection', which automatically spots and blocks spoofed calls on iOS and Android for customers of Bell, Virgin Plus, Lucky Mobile and its other mobile brands, with no opt-in. Bell calls itself Canada's first carrier to flag spoofing with AI; its existing anti-fraud technology had analysed 4.4 billion calls and blocked or labelled over 540 million suspicious ones.
Annahar airs a news bulletin read entirely by AI presenters
Annahar Media Group — Annahar Media Group aired a bulletin read entirely by AI news anchors in Beirut on 27 July 2026. Digital presenter Noor interacted directly with digital correspondent Nahar, billed as a first for Lebanon and the Arab world. Points Information Technology, a Lebanese firm led by Bilal Kassassir, runs the strategy.
Annahar gives its Lebanon newsroom an AI news correspondent
Annahar Media Group — Annahar Media Group has equipped its newsroom in Lebanon with an AI news correspondent, Nahar, assembled with Points Information Technology. Nahar sweeps thousands of outlets within moments, follows world affairs, weighs rival accounts, renders languages and condenses documents. Editor-in-chief Nayla Tueni cast the AI reporter as a colleague enlarging what journalists achieve.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentArmenia25 Jun 2026
Armenia's 485 Center releases an 80-minute AI-animated epic film
485 Center for Generative Technologies — Little Mher, an 80-minute animated feature drawn from the Armenian epic Daredevils of Sassoun, reached Yerevan screens on 31 May 2026 and went on general release across the country. The 485 Center for Generative Technologies confined AI film animation to drawing frames and moving them: script, vocals, score and art styling stayed with a crew of actors, musicians, screenwriters, illustrators, cinematographers and machine-learning experts, according to director-producer Hovhannes Margaryan. Matching machine-made pictures to Armenian dialogue proved hardest, since such models mostly learn from English. Its makers bill it a regional first.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentColombia18 Jun 2026
Tigo starts AI phone customer-service trial in regulator's sandbox
Tigo (Colombia Móvil and UNE EPM Telecomunicaciones) — Colombia's Communications Regulation Commission (CRC) has opened the testing phase of ConTIGO Digital, Tigo's project for AI customer service by phone. Full Tigo subscribers are first to try the phone AI, linked to the operator's internal systems, and the CRC will use the results to weigh regulatory changes.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentBelarus3 Jun 2026
BelTA uses AI to animate archival photographs and build graphics
BelTA — BelTA has built AI photo restoration and video work into daily production, director general Andrei Mokhor told the 34th Council of Heads of CIS State News Agencies in St Petersburg. The Belarusian Telegraph Agency animates archival and historical photographs, produces colourised archive footage, generates billboards, posters and infographics, and upscales old frames for large-format exhibitions. Writing or editing copy stays off limits — Mokhor calls that a taboo.
RegulationMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentSouth Sudan2 Jun 2026
South Sudan Media Authority approves AI use in newsrooms
South Sudan Media Authority — AI in newsrooms now has official backing in South Sudan, as the Media Authority tells outlets to embrace the technology carefully. Speaking in Juba, Sapana Abuyi said nothing bars its use, but pushed for training staff on verifying AI-generated material before publishing. News came via a gathering run by the Union of Journalists of South Sudan and Norwegian People's Aid.
RegulationMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentMexico15 May 2026
Mexico bans AI cloning of performers' voices and faces without consent
Congreso de la Unión / Diario Oficial de la Federación — Mexico's Federal Copyright Law reform, in the Official Gazette on 14 May 2026 and effective next day, imposes an AI voice cloning ban on performers' voices and faces without consent. Fines reaching 40,000 days' minimum wage shield voice actors, dubbing artists and announcers from unauthorised clones.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentQatar10 May 2026
Qatar News Agency uses AI to add Russian, Hindi and Urdu services
Qatar News Agency — Qatar News Agency has added AI-produced news services in Russian, Hindi and Urdu, lifting its publishing languages to eight with Arabic, English, French, German and Spanish. The director-general says AI had already been part of the agency's news system for a while.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentCabo Verde8 May 2026
Kriol Think's election AI answers 802 voter questions in 14 days
Kriol Think — Kriol Think fielded 802 queries over a 14-day run at 100% uptime through the AI electoral assistant Nós AI Eleitor 2026, built by Edson da Veiga for Cabo Verde's legislative elections. Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 drafted every reply strictly from the parties' own electoral programmes, three loaded, MpD, PAICV and UCID, while PTS and PP awaited release, and each response pinpointed the underlying passages. Guardrails barred political views, party endorsements and fabricated material, obliged the assistant to concede gaps, and excluded identifiable personal data, stored query wording and tracking cookies. Unaligned and free, this election AI tool emerged from a non-profit civic venture whose running costs Edson da Veiga chased via GoFundMe; the usage totals are Kriol Think's own, surfacing on an archive page after the ballot.
Cuban state television puts AI-generated presenters into Cuerda Viva spots
Television Cubana — Television Cubana has fielded two AI-generated presenters, Ava and Chico, across trailers for the music show Cuerda Viva, appearing as announcers, or reading round-ups and listings. Cari Rojas, communication director of Television Cubana, dates Ava to a Cuerda Viva festival; Ana Rabasa, who runs the show, brought in Chico later. Felito Ruiz, the team's designer, assembled both on no-cost software of limited scope, and calls these virtual TV hosts wholly invented looks, resting on no prior pattern.
Punktum.fo — Heini Festirstein and Eyðstein Johannesen have launched Punktum.fo, a Faroe Islands news site built on AI news writing. Punktum.fo pulls stories from vetted sources into short, plain-language Faroese summaries, each with an audio option. Every source stays visible on the page. The pair made it partly to push Faroese-language AI forward, calling that transparency non-negotiable for AI-generated news.
Somalia's information ministry deploys AI for translation and content generation
Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism (Somalia) — Somalia's Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism now uses AI translation for government media, folding automated content generation for public broadcasting into one digital distribution pipeline. A ministry communications consultant told the East Africa Science and Technology Commission summit the shift has cut editorial production time sharply, replacing manual steps with a faster information network.
Philippe Shangti premieres a fully AI-made feature film in Andorra
Philippe Shangti — Philippe Shangti unveiled Remember the Future: 2320 at Cinemes Illa Carlemany in Andorra la Vella, a 95-minute sci-fi title billed as the nation's earliest AI-generated film. Some 45,000 visual prompts fed the assembly across almost twelve months. Camera crews sat out this AI filmmaking.
Radio Ndeke Luka's StopAtènè unit flags an AI-made Kim Jong-un video
Radio Ndeke Luka — Radio Ndeke Luka's Bangui verification desk, #StopAtenè, ran AI deepfake detection, the tool Hive Detection, against a clip alleging Kim Jong-un's pledge of North Korean military backing for Iran. It measured a 98.5% probability the clip's voice was synthetic, with manipulation markers elsewhere in the footage, and separately caught the clip misdating a Kim address to 25 March 2026 against his genuine 23 March appearance. #StopAtenè's verdict, published 2 April 2026 through AI-generated video verification, found no proof behind the claim.
RegulationMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentBenin13 Mar 2026
Benin's media regulator bars AI manipulation in election coverage
Haute autorité de l'audiovisuel et de la communication — The Haute Autorité de l'Audiovisuel et de la Communication forbade newsrooms to doctor what goes to air, or what candidates say, using “uncontrolled and irresponsible” artificial intelligence. That Benin AI regulation shaped the presidential ballot of 12 April 2026, the opening round's canvassing window running 27 March to 10 April. Outlets straying from the AI campaign rules risk penalties reaching instant removal from official election coverage.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentKyrgyzstan2 Mar 2026
Kyrgyz Parliament introduces AI news anchors Myrza and Aiyym
Jogorku Kenesh (Parliament of Kyrgyzstan) — Kyrgyzstan's Jogorku Kenesh has unveiled AI news anchors, Myrza and Aiyym, reporting on legislative business. These virtual news presenters turn out written summaries and clips explaining debates, keeping citizens informed of deputies' activities. Speaker Marlen Mamataliev tied the launch to the legislature's digitalisation push.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentVatican City20 Feb 2026
St Peter's Basilica follows Mass in 60 languages with AI
Fabric of St Peter — The Fabric of St Peter brings AI simultaneous translation to St Peter's Basilica, carrying liturgies live in up to 60 languages, partnered by the Dicastery for Communication and the technology company Translated. Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, archpriest of the basilica, unveiled the scheme four centuries after the 1626 consecration. A QR code inside the church opens a browser page relaying readings, prayers and chants as sound and text in each pilgrim's tongue, nothing to download. Antonio Autorino, communications head there, dates full running of the machine interpreting to spring 2026, trials among chosen worshippers having already begun.
Evidence of impactMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentGlobal2026
Only 13% of news leaders call their AI initiatives transformational
Only 13% of 280 news leaders in 51 countries called their newsrooms' current AI initiatives 'transformational' in the Reuters Institute's 2026 survey (44% promising, 42% limited). The report flags growing 'disillusionment', a sober turn after last year's claim that most newsrooms were transforming.
Centrafrique Check's AI tools unmask a fake MSF arrest photo
Centrafrique Check — Centrafrique Check, a Bangui fact-checking outlet, ran AI image detection with two tools, MyDetector and TruthScan, on a photo attached to claims a French national had been arrested in Zémio, Haut-Mbomou, circulating from around 7 March 2026. Médecins Sans Frontières had confirmed the detention, around 4 March 2026, of two of its own staff, one French and one Central African, taken to Bangui. Both tools put roughly 98% odds on artificial generation, pointing to a skin-tone mismatch on the soldier's hand where it gripped the detainee. AI-generated photo verification found the arrest genuine, the picture false.
Evidence of impactMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentGlobal2025
85% of researchers say AI has improved their efficiency
85% of researchers in a Wiley survey of 2,430 (August 2025) credit AI with better efficiency. Nearly three-quarters saw gains in both quantity and quality of work.
Reach's AI tool cuts breaking-news publishing to 90 seconds
Reach plc, the UK's largest commercial news publisher, uses Guten, an in-house AI tool that turns trusted news-wire copy into stories for its titles, which journalists review before publication. At WAN-IFRA's Newsroom Summit, chief digital publisher David Higgerson said Guten cut breaking-news publishing from nine minutes to 90 seconds and supported about a quarter of output.
Yemen
Hungary
South Korea
Czechia
Germany
United States
United Kingdom
Curaçao
Jamaica
Nigeria
Spain
Mexico
Canada
Lebanon
Armenia
Colombia
Belarus
South Sudan
Qatar
Cabo Verde
Cuba
Faroe Islands
Somalia
Andorra
Central African Republic
Benin
Kyrgyzstan
Vatican City