SNS – What Video Editors Need When Everything Is Changing Around Them

Editors aren’t afraid of AI. They’re afraid of being left behind.

Melanie Ciotti, Director of Marketing, Studio Network Solutions (SNS)

Do you remember when Casio came out with digital keyboards?

The year was 1981. MTV hadn’t even celebrated its first birthday. IBM had just introduced its first personal computer. Arcades were packed, cassette tapes ruled car stereos, and suddenly, for a few hundred dollars, almost anyone could sit down at a keyboard and play something that vaguely resembled music. With the press of a button, you had strings, brass, organs, drums, rhythms. Everyone and their mom seemed to become a “musician” overnight.
That’s where we are with AI right now.

Today, anyone can generate a video, write a script, or create a graphic in seconds. But just like the prolific amateur synth tracks of the ’80s, we’re starting to see the same sentence structures, the same visual gloss, the same hollow-but-polished content everywhere.

The barrier to creating content has dropped. The barrier to creating something memorable hasn’t.

Efficiency Boost or Existential Threat?
Most industry commentary forces creatives into one of two camps: you either view AI as a productivity miracle or an existential threat. For editors, the reality is far messier.
Let’s look at the data.

Adobe’s 2026 survey of 400 creative professionals found that 94% of respondents say they can produce content faster with AI, and creatives report saving an average of 17 hours a week. And it’s not just faster—it’s better, too. One animator put it this way: “My overall work quality and the depth of my illustrations have skyrocketed since AI.”

In contrast, a widely cited CVL Economics study estimates that roughly one in five U.S. film, television, and animation jobs could be consolidated or significantly changed by generative AI over the next few years.

One. In. Five.

Creative Boom’s 2026 survey of 882 creative professionals found that 86% are already using AI in their work, yet only 10% believe its overall impact on the creative industry has been positive.

The tools are genuinely useful. The uncertainty is genuine, too. The overwhelming message is that many creatives feel they have to use AI, regardless of their hesitations about authorship, pricing, and the future of their profession.

Being Irreplaceable
If you’ve caught yourself wondering “where do I fit” in all of this, you’re not the only one. People in almost every industry are asking the same question, and a lot of the answers coming back are, you guessed it, AI-scripted.

Platitudes like “embrace the tools” and “you’ll bounce back” aren’t helpful. Neither is shaming creatives for using AI to save a couple hours or improve their work.

So, again, we turn to the data. When Creative Boom asked its survey respondents what would genuinely improve their working lives, networking and community topped the list at 57.5%, with mentorship close behind at 53%. New tools and technology trailed at just 31%.

Read that again: creative professionals living through the most disruptive technological shift of their careers are asking, overwhelmingly, for people.

We could all use a hand. A real one, attached to a person who can touch grass and spell strawberry. If you already made it through technological shifts in the industry before—tape to nonlinear, film to digital—that experience matters.

Be a guiding light to those who feel the rug being pulled out from under them for the first time.

Because the path to being irreplaceable is being present.

Where SNS fits into this
We’re not going to pretend the AI shift isn’t real, or valid, or revolutionary. We know it is. You know it is. What we’re going to do instead is double down on our commitment to the creative community we’ve always served.

SNS has spent more than two decades building shared storage for editing teams. Our mission is—and has always been—to help media teams succeed by enabling them to affordably collaborate and easily store, organize, and share huge amounts of data. That was true before generative AI showed up, and it’s still true now. Whether that’s shared storage, media management, cloud workflows, or AI tools, the goal has stayed the same for more than 25 years: help creatives spend less time wrestling with technology and more time making something worth watching.

And we’ll keep supporting creatives like you through whatever shift comes next.