I2A2 CEO Renard T. Jenkins Talks Hollywood Since the Strikes at Streaming Media 2025
Renard T. Jenkins, president and CEO of I2A2 Technologies and VP of the Hollywood Professional Association, sat down with Streaming Media contributing editor Timothy Fore-Siglin at Streaming Media 2025 to discuss how Hollywood has changed in the last few years, the importance of prioritizing good metadata, and why students shouldn’t rush into using AI.
Unfortunately, Fore-Siglin’s sound cuts out throughout the interview, but it’s still possible to understand Jenkins’ main points.
What I2A2 Does
Jenkins introduces himself and says that I2A2 Technologies, Studios & Labs focuses on ethical technology solutions; its “main goal is to make technology transparent to the user.” Customers are in the media and entertainment, marketing and research, and education and healthcare sectors, and it’s a primarily B2B business, but Jenkins notes that if a consumer requests a build, I2A2 will learn enough about the project to see if it’s a good fit. If it’s not, “we have a lot of partners that we work with that we connect them to,” Jenkins promises.
I2A2 works to build solutions that can scale, while individual customers tend to have specific problems they want to solve, he explains. “If you have the time and have the idea, we’ll always want to jump in, but if we’re not the right group for you, we believe in finding someone who can be.”
Getting Metadata Right
Jenkins speaks about a panel from the conference that focused on the state of Hollywood since the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 strikes, and the “disruption” of generative AI. He sees “metadata as a lifeblood to where it is that we’re going right now with the just massive amount of content that we will be seeing and the massive amount of legacy content that already exists but isn’t properly itemized and labeled and tracked and cataloged and all those wonderful things. There is a wide open space for metadata to be that lifeblood,” he asserts. Having effective metadata in place that travels with your assets will “be key to you being able to totally exploit all of this new emerging technology. One of the things that’s really important is the onset and sort of this rise of the understanding of semantic search.”
Jenkins says semantic search only works if there’s a rich bank of metadata to pull from. “It’s really about looking at how we give customers what they want, meet them where they are, and create a hyper-personalized experience for them,” he notes, lamenting that today’s algorithms can introduce circular thinking and an echo chamber. But there’s hope: “With all of this data that we are collecting, there’s opportunities for us to think of things a little bit differently, understanding how to maybe drop in a few things that may be outside of the normal way that a person may think.”
AI: Proceed With Caution
Jenkins is an advocate for not believing the hype about AI. “It’s not a cure-all. The systems themselves are nothing more than statistics, probability, and mathematics. That’s what AI is.” He explains that AI is an algorithm that is designed to answer a question by providing “an answer based off of the probability that this is the correct answer for you to have. So math is an important part of it, and there’s going to have to be some checks and balances, and that checks and balances is going to be human [involvement].”
He addresses students deciding on a career path. “You can actually create great things using your skills to do something that could take AI, or whatever the next thing is, further than it could ever have been on its own,” he believes. “When you are using these systems, also keep in mind that what you want to do is ask the system to help you walk through the problem, not to solve the problem.” The danger for young people relying on AI is, he says, “If you start to use these systems too much, you will start to diminish your ability to use critical thinking. And you want to actually continue to grow your mind, have that gray matter in your brain, learn to critically think about problems and think them through, because that will lead you to understanding how to survive in this life.”
His wisdom comes from experience. Jenkins acknowledges with a laugh, “I make the joke that yes, I am old. I have earned every gray hair, and I’m pretty much proud of it.”
Join us December 9-11 and tune in for more great conversations at Streaming Media Connect! Registration is free and open now!
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