AI Takes Center Stage at Tech-Forward AFM With Innovation Hub and AFM House Expansion

First it came for the films, then the film festivals. Now, AI has taken hold of this year’s American Film Market.

The five-day independent film marketplace in Los Angeles, produced by the Independent Film and Television Alliance, already has a splashy year planned, with pic packages on offer, including a new Armando Iannucci film and A24’s expensive “Elden Ring” adaptation. But as producers and distributors go about buying and selling movies, they’ll do so as the film industry’s third rail — artificial intelligence — takes center stage.

The 2026 edition will see the market’s Innovation Hub, a space where exhibitors showcase new technologies gripping Hollywood, expand into its inaugural “AFM House,” a 15,000-square-foot space across from the AFM HQ at the Fairmont Century Plaza. The list of companies participating has also expanded, with nearly 20 firms eager to highlight their own technology and a suite of new panels discussing AI’s impact.

The Hub launched last year in collaboration with the Marché du Film, the Cannes Film Festival’s cinema marketplace that proved to be very AI-friendly this year. But this year’s extensive expansion of the Hub, and the prominence of AI, represents the latest example of Hollywood’s growing tolerance for the technology in how films are produced, sold and distributed — all tenets of AFM.

“Technology is going to be a key driver, no matter where you sit on kind of AI,” says Jackie Brenneman, who is shepherding her first AFM after taking the reins as IFTA president in January. “AI as a creative tool — there’s a lot more debate on that than AI as a really great way to analyze data and make predictions. That’s what AI has been doing for a long time, and so AI serves lots of different roles. At AFM, we’re not here to make a judgment call, but I do think that a lot of the tools … are much more in the latter [category], in using AI and data to help people make better decisions or do things better, faster, cheaper, and less on just AI as the next full-scale studio. But of course, we have room for all.”

Such an expansion in space for the Innovation Hub means an expansion of the companies set to populate it.

Returning to AFM is Largo.ai, a Sylvester Stallone-backed Swiss firm that uses AI to help brands, studios and creatives determine whether their idea is producible. The company was founded in 2018 as an offshoot of the Swiss university EPFL, back when AI was simply “machine learning” and the AI agents we’ve come to know and somewhat fear were merely the product of science fiction. Its collection of tools includes simulated focus groups and projections to see which actors could best fit a character, providing independent filmmakers with the tools usually reserved for the deep-pocketed Hollywood studios.

Largo’s chief panel at AFM includes a “Shark Tank”-style pitch presentation, where producers working with the firm will showcase for distributors and financiers how Largo’s platform can help analyze the commercial viability of their projects. Sami Arpa, the firm’s CEO, says Largo is mindful of fears that film production can be too data-driven and argues the company is more “data-assisted” than eager to infuse AI into the creative process. “In the tools specifically, we never tell people what to do,” he says.

“There are tools a bit going beyond that,” he admits. “They are replacing full human creativity. Obviously, people are feeling danger from that, and I think they have the right to feel that danger. But with our experience, we don’t think the audience is welcoming full AI-generated content if a human still is not at the center of the creativity.”

For those in Hollywood who do want to create fully AI-generated content, enter Oxen.ai.

The company, founded in 2022 by IBM veteran Greg Schoeninger, works as both a platform for creators to build AI shots with a selection of AI models and as a studio to produce AI shots for vendors. Some of the creatives who’ve used its tools come from Disney, Google and Live Nation.

The platform differentiates itself from other similar all-in-one model aggregators such as Higgsfield and OpenArt by publicly outlining the token cost for each model it offers before anyone pays a cent, including the pennies it costs to use Black Forest Labs’ FLUX models and the $55-per-million tokens Claude’s Fable model requires. It adds a layer of transparency to the use of AI that’s often obscured by monthly subscription costs offered by competing platforms, a fact Schoeninger takes great pride in. “It’s a subtle thing, but it’s a huge reason people switch,” he says.

Schoeninger says AFM approached the company about appearing in the new AFM House after the startup’s “Cmd+Shift+Create” summit in September. At that event, professionals across the AI and creative landscape met and showcased how they’re weaving the technology into their work. He says the market’s expanded embrace of the technology reflects the “tipping point” the industry has reached, one where more Hollywood luminaries and executives are willing to go public about how they’re using AI despite the fear expressed by some of their peers over its impact on human jobs and creativity.

“‘Jurassic Park’ is one of the first movies to do full visual effects,” he says, noting the few minutes in the 1993 film that contained computer-generated imagery. “It just felt like there was way more because of how Steven Spielberg used it in the film. I feel like we’re kind of in that era right now where, yeah, you might get ripped on if you’re doing a whole film in AI, but if you just use it for those shots that you need it, it seamlessly fades into the background or helps bring the film to life.”

AI is also a focal point of some of AFM’s panels, such as the Producers Guild of America’s panel on “the AI Decisions Facing Film and TV Leaders” on the market’s main stage. The Cine Group, a Paris-based company that works with cinema operators, is bringing its Marché du Film-backed Cinemas Club to the AFM House and hosting a panel on how non-generative AI in the industry is a “utility rather than Tilly” — as in Norwood, the AI actress rankling Hollywood’s creatives.

Patrick von Sychowski, the Cine Group’s international editor-in-chief and moderator of the panel, says the discussion is meant to reflect how AI already has a stronghold across film, and “sticking your head in the sand is not a solution.” AFM is representative of that ethos in its willingness to showcase the technology, he adds.

“AFM under IFTA is not just moving with the times, but trying to stay a step or two ahead of the times in terms of what is required at these kinds of get-togethers,” von Sychowski says. “It’s such a unique opportunity to get together in person and bring together the right people for discussions, for deals, everything.”

Being so public about embracing the technology does harbor some risk. Take the case of Urbanworld, the BIPOC-focused film festival that lost a yearslong sponsor in the AI-averse Writers Guild of America over its decision to host an AI program for its 30th edition last month. Big A-list festivals, such as Cannes, exclude AI-generated films from their official lineups.

But Brenneman, while sensitive to people’s fears over the technology, says the purpose of the marketplace is to allow producers and financiers to determine what types of films emerge for public consumption. If they decide it’s AI films, then so be it.

“We’re not a festival,” she says. “We are not making selections. We do not make judgment calls. That’s for the buyers. You know, the buyers are the ones who get to decide who it is that they want to support, what art it is that they think is commercial. Our job is just to make sure that there’s a forum to enable that to happen.”

AI Takes Center Stage at Tech-Forward AFM With Innovation Hub and AFM House Expansion