By Triada Lakoutsi, VP of Professional Services at Fabric
Earlier this month, I had the honor of joining a panel of remarkable women at Women in the Cloud: Media Edition x ECT Women, hosted at the Amazon corporate office in London and sponsored by AWS and Ingram Micro. The event lived up to its name: we gathered in a wonderful space on the 16th floor, nearly touching the clouds — though the clouds themselves were nowhere to be found, thanks to the heatwave London was experiencing that day. The discussion covered what it actually takes to lead in media and technology right now, where AI is delivering real value versus generating noise, and what changes when you step into senior leadership. The conversation got honest fast — and that is what made it worth being in the room for.
The panel was held under the Chatham House Rule, so the specifics stay in the room. But the themes are ones I see across our industry every day: share the knowledge, invest in strong communities and real teamwork, and embrace AI with a human firmly in the loop. And this community lives those values. When the sun came blazing through those massive windows in the sky and landed squarely on me, a handheld fan magically appeared, like help from the gods in ancient Greek dramas (deus ex machina — and yes, being Greek, this is exactly how I grew up). Human not only in the loop, but jumping on it.
That resonates with me because of where I sit in this industry. As VP of Professional Services at Fabric, my team is in the room when a broadcaster migrates decades of scheduling data, when a studio's operations team runs their first end-to-end workflow on a new platform, when a customer asks whether the promised efficiency gains will actually show up in their day-to-day. If there is a gap between what the industry says on stage and what happens inside media organizations, my team lives in that gap. And this year, that gap has become the story.
The industry has moved past "whether" — now it's "how fast, and how well"
The exploratory phase is over. The organizations we work with are no longer asking whether AI and connected platforms will reshape media operations — they are asking how quickly they can operationalize them, and why some initiatives deliver while others stall. From where my team sits, the answer is rarely the technology itself. The organizations making the fastest progress share a few traits:
They treat workflows as first-class citizens. A platform can be brilliant, but if the people scheduling resources, managing assets, or preparing content for delivery cannot see how their day gets better, adoption stalls. The best transformations start not with a feature list but with a deep understanding of how work actually flows — and where it gets stuck.
They invest in their data foundation before they invest in intelligence. AI is only as effective as the operational context it can access. When we onboard a new customer, the quality of their existing data tells us more about their transformation timeline than almost anything else — and once that foundation is built, everything that follows accelerates.
They know efficiency is earned in the details. The headline numbers are real, but they are the sum of hundreds of small improvements: an integration that eliminates duplicate data entry, an automation that removes a manual handoff, a unified view that saves an operations team an hour every morning. This is the work my team is proudest of, because it is where transformation stops being a slide and becomes someone's better Tuesday.
They share the knowledge. This was the thread that ran through the entire panel, and it holds just as true inside media organizations. The teams that succeed are the ones where expertise flows instead of sitting locked in one person's head. Community and teamwork are not soft topics — they are operational advantages.
Looking ahead to IBC
All of this is why I am so excited about IBC this year. What I cannot wait to share in Amsterdam is the progress we have made since we first launched X2 at NAB — a completely modern user experience built on thirty-five years of proven functionality, and something my whole team is incredibly proud of. Organizations should not have to choose between a system that is deep and a system that is intuitive; X2 gives their teams both. And we will be showing it from our unique boat set-up, which I can promise is the best meeting room at the show.
But what I am most looking forward to are the conversations. If you are wrestling with how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, how to modernize workflows without disrupting the operations that keep your business running, or how to make a platform migration deliver value from day one — those are the conversations we want to have.
The next era of media operations will not be won by the organizations with the most ambitious announcements. It will be won by the ones that execute — that connect their systems, trust their data, share their knowledge, and redesign their workflows with the people who run them. My team helps make that happen every day, and there is nowhere better than IBC to talk about it.
We will see you in Amsterdam — come find us on the boat.
Read More Articles
We're constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible and seeking new ways to improve our services. Search your topic of interest.
