McKinsey Projects 80-90% Efficiency Gains in VFX and 3D Asset Creation from Generative AI
A McKinsey analysis of generative AI's impact on entertainment finds studio executives expect efficiency gains of up to 90 percent in VFX and 3D asset creation as the tools mature.
Management consultancy McKinsey has published an in-depth analysis of how generative AI is reshaping entertainment production economics, framing the shift across a set of plausible scenarios ranging from incremental productivity gains within current workflows to a more fundamental restructuring of the industry's entire value chain.
The most striking figure in the analysis: studio executives surveyed expect efficiency gains of as much as 80 to 90 percent in VFX and 3D asset creation specifically, as generative AI tools continue to mature. The report situates this projection against a broader context of flat premium TV and film budgets, long production timelines, and intensifying competition for increasingly fragmented viewer attention — with the average US adult now spending close to seven hours a day watching video content across platforms.
McKinsey's analysis outlines four possible trajectories for the industry: incremental productivity gains layered onto current workflows; entirely new production processes enabled by emerging tools; a restructured industry model in which creative boundaries and value pools are redrawn between production and distribution; and, at the far end, a fundamental reset of the economic model underpinning video production altogether, extending even to user-generated content.
Editorial view: Numbers of this magnitude deserve healthy scrutiny until they show up consistently across delivered, billed projects rather than internal pilot programs and executive surveys — efficiency claims in any emerging technology tend to compress under real production conditions. That said, even a fraction of an 80-90 percent gain in VFX and asset-creation time would meaningfully reshape production budgets and delivery timelines industry-wide. For mid-sized production and post houses like ours, the practical question isn't whether to adopt these tools — it's how quickly we build the internal expertise to use them well, before the efficiency gap between early and late adopters becomes a genuine competitive disadvantage.
