Studio Blo Predicts 90% of Ad Films Will Be AI-Made by 2027

By 2027, close to 90% of the world’s ad films will be generated by AI instead of filmed on a camera. That is the forecast from Dipankar Mukherjee, co-founder and chief executive of Studio Blo, a Mumbai-based AI-native production house, and the definition tucked inside that number does most of the work.

His own company tells a messier story than the headline. Studio Blo still hires cinematographers, costume designers and voice actors, still runs performance capture with real actors, and still pays a largely traditional post-production bill. The camera goes; almost everyone around it stays.

The Forecast Behind the 90% Headline

Read the prediction closely and there are really two claims wearing one suit. In the soft version, Mukherjee says every business will be AI-enabled by 2027, film companies included, so a shoot counts even if AI only touches pre-production or post. In the hard version, he says most ad films will be “made by AI, and not shot on camera.” Those are very different worlds.

The trade data lands somewhere in between. In its 2025 video ad spend and strategy report, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB, the US body that tracks digital ad spending) found that about 86% of video ad buyers are already using or planning to use generative AI to build creative, with half doing it now. Those same buyers expect gen-AI creative to make up 40% of all ads by 2026. That is a long way from 90% of finished films being fully synthetic, and the gap is mostly about what you count.

So the safe reading of the forecast is the soft one: within two years, AI shows up somewhere in nearly every ad film. The world where the camera disappears for most commercials is the bet the studio is actually willing to make, and it rests on a claim about money.

Where the Money Goes When the Set Disappears

The cost case is real, and it is the reason brands are calling. An AI film deletes most of the spending that has nothing to do with the idea on screen, which is exactly why the conversation around it gets stuck on price.

What Comes Off the Budget

Once there is no set to build and no crew to fly out, whole categories of a production budget vanish. AI-first studios and platforms claim the saving runs 60% to 90% against a traditional shoot, with turnaround times cut sharply. Mukherjee does not dispute the direction, only the framing that AI is purely a discount. The lines that come off the budget are concrete:

• Location management and rentals
• Support staff and crew logistics
• Large parts of physical production design
• Set construction and the visual effects (VFX) scoped around it

GPU Burn and the Talent That Stays

What the spreadsheet gains in one column it spends in another. The CEO is blunt that AI content is not a push-button job; it is “highly iterative and experimental,” and the experimentation runs on graphics hardware, the GPUs (graphics processing units) that crunch every generation. “There is a serious GPU burn and a lot of token consumption that goes into telling a story well using AI,” he says.

Human cost stays fundamental too. Writers, the directorial team, the cinematographer, the production designer, the costume designer, the sound designer, the music director, the foley artist and the voice actors all still get paid. Studio Blo keeps real actors for performance capture on intense, emotive scenes, and brings in action choreographers for its feature and series work. Post-production timelines, he says, are largely unchanged, and the VFX bill shrinks without disappearing.

The AI Stack Studio Blo Runs On

The work runs on a mix of off-the-shelf models and software the studio built itself. Two public tools do most of the heavy lifting on pixels: Kling’s AI video generation platform and Google DeepMind’s Nano Banana Pro image model. Around those sit three proprietary systems.

The limits have moved. Skin texture, anatomical and environmental consistency, and lip sync are no longer the problems they were a year ago, by the studio’s own account. What still fights back is control: getting an AI shot to obey a director on camera movement and lighting the way a real rig would. That is the gap the company says it is now trying to close.

What Studio Blo Has Already Put on Screen

The pitch is backed by a client list that reads like a normal agency roster: Mahindra, Aditya Birla Capital, Shemaroo, plus music and film names beyond advertising. For the studio’s co-founder, the tooling is not the point.

AI is not a tool. That severely undermines what it brings to the table. AI is infrastructure. It’s a new operating model.

That is the CEO’s view, and his Women’s Day film for Shemaroo shows what he means by it. “The Glass Ceiling” shows an office ceiling lowering onto a working woman until she and others from different professions push it back up and away. In a traditional workflow, the team had planned a safer, cheaper execution. Going fully AI-native, he says, let the director and production designer chase harder shots, because there were no sets to build and no effects to scope.

The bigger swing is Warlord, a science-fiction storyverse co-produced with director Shekhar Kapur and built across film, television and gaming. Studio Blo, founded in 2024, has said sequences that once took months now take about two weeks. Yet the main frustration with Indian brands is that most still treat AI as a discount instead of a way to build a larger story world. India’s advertisers are racing toward cheaper video at the same moment the country’s streaming business is leaning harder on ads to cover a wide gap between viewers and paying subscribers, which makes low-cost film volume tempting for the wrong reason.

The Ethics Line and the Vernacular Bet

If the camera is going away, the harder questions are about faces and voices that belong to real people. Here the studio draws sharper lines than the cost talk suggests.

Owning the Clone

On identity, Studio Blo takes an ethics-first line. Its FAIMOUS platform handles what the company calls ethical cloning: celebrities own their own datasets and official clones, which can then be leased to third parties on a tenure-based, traceable basis. On voices, the rule is stricter. The studio avoids voice cloning and tools like ElevenLabs’ AI voice software, relying entirely on human voice actors. For its animated features, illustrators are commissioned for original characters first, and only then are AI models trained on that art to speed up production.

Personalisation Without the Slop

Hyper-personalisation is where Mukherjee pumps the brakes. Auto-personalising content at scale, he argues, is a bad move without human intent behind it; the result is what he calls AI slop. The one use case he expects to become normal by the end of this year is natural-voice vernacular dubbing with proper lip sync, so a Tamil-speaking or Marathi-speaking viewer anywhere in the world watches an ad in a mother tongue. End-to-end AI ad films, he says, are already possible and will be the norm for performance and email marketing within a year. The advertising that shifts how people feel about a brand, he insists, stays human-directed.

He puts the limit of the technology plainly: by 2027, “90% of all ad films in the world will be made by AI, and not shot on camera. AI would replace only the camera, though, not the human behind it.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Will AI replace film crews in advertising?

No. Studio Blo still employs writers, directors, cinematographers, sound and costume designers, foley artists and voice actors, and uses real actors for performance capture. The company’s argument is that AI removes the camera and the logistics around it, not the people who shape each shot.

How much can AI cut ad production costs?

AI-first studios claim savings of 60% to 90% versus a traditional shoot, mostly from cutting locations, rentals, crew logistics and set building. But part of that saving moves to GPU compute, token usage and the same human creative fees, so budgets shift more than they collapse.

What AI tools does Studio Blo use?

It uses public models including Kling for video and Google’s Nano Banana Pro for images, plus three in-house systems: FAIMOUS for licensed celebrity cloning, GRID for performance capture and KUBRIK for storyboarding.

Does AI advertising raise authenticity and copyright concerns?

Yes. Studio Blo says celebrities own their datasets and license official clones on a traceable, time-limited basis through FAIMOUS, avoids voice cloning in favour of human voice actors, and commissions original illustration before training models on it.