The AI landscape doesn't move in one direction — it lurches. Some techniques leap from experiment to table stakes in a single quarter; others stall against regulatory walls, technical ceilings, or organisational inertia that no amount of hype can dislodge. Knowing which is which is the hard part. The State of Play cuts through the noise with a rigorously maintained index of AI techniques across every major business domain — classified by maturity, evidenced by real-world adoption, and updated daily so you always know where you stand relative to the field. Stop guessing. Start knowing.
A daily newsletter distilling the past two weeks of movement in a domain or two — delivered to your inbox while the index updates in the background.
Each dot marks the weighted maturity of practices within a domain — hover for a brief summary, click for more detail
AI generation of short-form video content for social media, advertising, and promotional clips. Includes text-to-video and image-to-video generation for brief clips; distinct from long-form generation which produces extended narratives.
Short-form AI video generation has crossed into mainstream production deployment across marketing, social content, and e-commerce workflows, with 1M+ YouTube channels now using AI creation tools daily and $18.6B market value. The practice—generating sub-60-second clips from text, images, or reference materials—is a proven alternative to traditional production for high-volume, low-creative-variance content, with 91% cost reduction ($4.5k traditional to $400/min AI-assisted) and 100x per-second advantage. Runway Gen-4.5 and Google Veo 3.1 have achieved production-readiness: human perception studies show 90% of viewers cannot distinguish AI-generated video from real, while named enterprise deployments (20th Century Studios, Netflix Japan, Lionsgate) execute professional VFX and pre-production workflows. Cost economics enable high-frequency production—brands now post 9.5+ times daily across platforms, impossible without AI. Yet the practice reveals sharp economic and governance boundaries. OpenAI's Sora discontinuation (April 26, 2026) documented the constraint explicitly: inference cost ($1M/day) unsustainable against zero monetization from free-tier users, and the core limit is not capability but business model viability. Adoption stratifies by context: marketing and advertising production-ready at scale; enterprise B2B shifting toward human-led production with AI assistance, rejecting pure AI-generated approaches for authenticity and trust; e-commerce validating 80%+ conversion-rate lifts but limited to product-demo use cases. The defining barriers are now economic (unit costs remain fragile at scale), regulatory (copyright litigation unresolved, content provenance standards absent, mandatory AI disclosure now enforced across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Google Ads), and contextual (governance constraints limit deployment beyond low-creative-variance marketing).
Market stratification has sharpened by use case and business model. Runway ($5.3B valuation after $315M Series E in Feb 2026, $860M total raised) dominates professional deployment with named clients (20th Century Studios, Alien: Romulus VFX; Netflix Japan; Lionsgate, House of David Season 2; Toei Animation, Bandai Namco, Sony Pictures Japan). The platform has transitioned from experimental tool to integrated pre-production infrastructure, with workflows now combining text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video capabilities. HeyGen (bootstrap-funded, $95M ARR, 85K paying customers, 3.2x viral coefficient) leads avatar-focused platforms through freemium accessibility and integrations (Canva 150M MAU, HubSpot, ChatGPT plugin), bifurcating from Synthesia ($146M ARR) by customer segment (creators vs enterprise compliance). Google Veo 3.1 dominates volume (96.4% of generation activity through YouTube bundling) but generates no revenue, establishing a structural problem: free users produce exploratory content, paying users produce marketing briefs. Pika Labs (14.5M users, $135M total funding, $80M Series B) maintains creator positioning with brand partnerships (Balenciaga, Fenty, Vogue), though credit-burn pricing frustrates professional adoption.
Production workflows have shifted to integrated multi-model infrastructure. Brands now deploy cost-optimized stacks combining Runway for character consistency, Kling for physics, Veo for audio sync, and image-to-video APIs for batch scaling. Documented deployments: 340-SKU e-commerce brand achieved 80% conversion-rate lift and 99% cost reduction; Animatic Media's fully AI-produced channel reached 9,900 monthly viewers. Cost structure enables high-frequency production—brands now post 9.5+ times daily across networks, driving shift from hero-asset to 15-30 variant workflows per video. Engagement parity achieved: AI-generated social clips reach 87% of human-content engagement; product demos 75-82%; brand storytelling 61% (projected to converge by 2028).
However, OpenAI's Sora discontinuation (April 26, 2026) exposed critical constraints. Despite technical breakthrough, Sora faced $1M/day inference costs, peak user base of 1M declining to <500K, and $2.1M lifetime revenue—a deployment failure driven by unit economics, not capability gaps. Analysis: free-tier users generate exploratory fantasies with zero conversion; paying users produce operational briefs (marketing, training). The ROI picture remains contested: 95% of corporate deployments fail to sustain returns beyond pilots. Production constraints persist: physics confusion, spatial inconsistency, texture melting, audio artifacts. Critically, enterprise B2B is shifting toward human-led production with AI assistance, explicitly rejecting pure AI-generated approaches. Quote (90 Seconds, 25K+ production platform): "Nothing compares to a real person sharing authentic experience." Regulatory barriers are tightening: YouTube requires AI content labels; Instagram/TikTok mandate disclosure; Google Ads bans deepfakes; UK statute repeals copyright for pure AI-generated output; SCOTUS settled that pure AI-generated content is uncopyrightable. The practice remains bounded: production-ready at scale in cost-optimized marketing; constrained in creative-demanding, regulated, and trust-critical contexts.
— The Editorial independent six-week benchmark (May 2026): 240 prompts across narrative, demo, and graphics; measured prompt adherence, temporal consistency, motion realism, generation cost. Sora 2 and Veo 3.1 lead for photorealistic text-to-video; Runway Gen-4.5, Kling 3.0 scored 9.4/10, 9.3/10.
— Runway market dominance: $315M Series E in Feb 2026 at $5.3B valuation; revenue trajectory $121M (2024) to $90M ARR (mid-2025); estimated 300K customers. Market leadership position and enterprise maturity.
— IAB market analysis: U.S. digital video ad spend $80B (2026), up 11% YoY; two-thirds of video buyers activating AI; market stratification by ROI profile and governance constraints.
— Genesys Growth three-platform comparison: peer-reviewed data showing 30-70% workflow productivity gains when AI accounted for minority of work; industry cases cite 80% task improvements; identifies adoption barriers vs hype.
— Market adoption at scale: 78% of marketing teams deploy AI video in at least one campaign per quarter; $18.6B global market (34% CAGR, up from $5.1B in 2023); 67% of AI-generated content underperforms vs human.
— Thicket Trends May 2026 field analysis: Sora 2 dominates cinematic hero clips on TikTok FYP (8-20s, volumetric lighting); Runway Gen-4 dominates professional editing; Veo 3 leads UGC at 87% engagement parity with human content.
— Koro AI case study: 50-SKU fashion brand deployed AI video generation with product-page scraping and AI avatars, generating 50 ads in 48 hours with 80% CVR lift vs traditional production.
— OpenAI's Sora discontinuation (March 24, 2026) documents deployment failure: unsustainable cost structure ($1M/day), limited sustained user engagement (1M→<500K), and counter-creative bias producing homogeneous outputs. Critical negative signal on economics and user adoption.