AI Adoption in the Production World
Production people we have a problem. We start our days at 7am, hop in the shower, grab our coffee, and head to a location for the load in. When we get there the doors are locked, so the phone calls start. Twenty minutes later the local GM is apologizing for being 30 minutes out. The gear finally loads in, the stage gets set, and today’s problems start to appear. The load out from last night ran long from 45 min changeovers, two encores, and a GM who kept stopping you every ten minutes to ask when you’d be done, like the asking was going to get you out any faster.
Imagine a world that just worked. The crew got enough rest. The set times were on time. The GM was standing at an open door when you pulled up. Sounds delightful, doesn’t it, a fantasy to run through your head on the next 7 hour drive.
That world is what AI keeps promising us. We’ll all get our time back, and maybe a little of our sanity with it. Even for us, out here in the production world. The pitch is simple, you give us the DATA and we’ll optimize your job.
Which brings us to the problem. Data. What does that even mean for a day in the life of touring production? I don’t keep a spreadsheet on where I got my coffee, or why last night’s GM was too fried to open the building on time. That data doesn’t exist.
Or does it …
The locked door wasn’t random. The advance sheet had the GM’s cell number and the building’s actual access time. It was sitting in an email thread from three weeks ago. Last night’s late out? The show schedule logged the set times. The changeover clock was running whether anyone paid attention or not. Every piece of the morning’s mess left its mark somewhere. It’s just that no one noted it.
The thing nobody says out loud. We already generate all of it. Every tech rider, stage plot, input list, and hospitality sheet is structured information sitting in a PDF. The door times, the union break clock, the truck ETAs, the load in times, it’s all gold and we walk past it every day. Call times, drive distances, hotel check-ins. All in a document somewhere, all forgotten by noon.
Why not catch it instead. A rider that reads itself against the venue and flags the power mismatch before you’re standing at the breaker box and wondering what to do. A whole season of load outs that finally tells you the truth, more than one encore and a 45 min changeover pushed you past 2 am four nights out of five, stop pretending tonight will be different. An automated trext “we’re 20 out” to the GM before load in. None of that requires new information. It requires somebody or something catching what we already produce and handing it back structured.The knowledge base already exists. It’s just stuck in our heads or scribbled on the back of a sticky note that you left stuck to the bottom of your monitor. The info was never the problem. Taking the time to get that info where it needed to be was.
Look, I know the reality. We’re not out here to build data banks, we’re out here to get the show up and get the trucks rolling. Nobody’s got a spare hand during load out. But that’s exactly why it never happens, and exactly why it’s worth the little bit of extra effort, one logged note, one shared doc, one last advance that didn’t die in an inbox or the outbox for that matter. Small enough to make a difference at the end of a 16 hour day.
We’re a stubborn crew. Set in our ways for good reasons. The ways mostly work. But if we keep throwing away the one thing that can make our lives easier, we don’t get to complain that the fantasy never shows up.
Catch it, log it, use it.