The Ceivo team just wrapped a week in the desert at the 2026 HPA Tech Retreat in Palm Springs. We were in the Innovation Zone with a booth, on stage talking about Model Context Protocol (MCP), and in back-to-back meetings with broadcasters, studios, platforms, and AI partners. Here's what stood out.
AI is no longer a track — it's the program
Attending the HPA Tech Retreat for the first time, one thing became immediately clear: AI isn't a side conversation anymore. The majority of the sessions placed AI at the heart of the conversation — not as novelty or experimentation, but as infrastructure shaping budgets, pipelines, and governance.
What was even more interesting was the shift in tone. The discussion has moved from "what can AI do?" to "how do we operationalize it responsibly?" From production economics to ethical documentation — consent, compensation, credit, and commercial safety — the focus has become more disciplined and more pragmatic.
"While much of the sector's energy is still oriented toward AI-driven content creation, our work at Ceivo has been focused elsewhere: content optimisation, practical AI guardrails, linking legal with finance and libraries, and — increasingly critical — giving organisations real control over AI costs as these technologies scale into production." — Davide Maglio, Burnlab
What we demoed
At the booth and on stage, we put Ceivo's MCP work front and center. We showed:
- Live Model Context Protocol demos — how agents and LLMs can safely query, retrieve, and reason over media inside Ceivo with policy enforcement happening in-flight, not after the fact.
- An Electric Sheep + Ceivo integration — an early look at how partner tools can plug into Ceivo over MCP to deliver richer, governed AI workflows on top of a customer's own library.
- Governance-first AI retrieval — every AI call against a media asset carries the rights, usage, and policy context a media operation actually needs.
- Practical agent use cases — from smart retrieval and clipping to multi-step workflows orchestrated through Ceivo's API.
Conversations that mattered
Some of the best moments at HPA happen between sessions. We had great conversations with AWS, with partners across the Innovation Zone, and with broadcasters and studios who are quietly rethinking how their media and rights data flows into AI systems. The recurring theme: everyone wants to move faster, and nobody wants to do it without a safety net.
What this means for where Ceivo is heading
HPA 2026 reinforced the thesis Ceivo was built on: AI inside a media operation is only useful if it's governed, traceable, and cost-aware from the very first call. MCP is the connective layer, and governance is what turns it into something enterprise media teams can actually deploy.
If this year was any indication, next year's HPA Tech Retreat will be essential viewing. In the meantime — we'll see you at NAB.