The Kinly view: Gen AI's Impact on the Future of Digital Signage

At Kinly, digital signage no longer means just screens on walls.

Thanks to flexible CMS platforms, AV content can be published across multiple devices, reaching the workforce wherever they are — whether that’s in office, at home, on-the-move, on the frontline, or even embedded in another organisation.

As digital signage has transcended simple in-office screens, the need for creative, flexible, and intelligent content to engage audiences has become increasingly important. This is where generative AI steps in.

Expanding creativity

The creative force of generative AI is undeniable. With recent phenomena like ChatGPT and Midjourney offering easy to use interfaces that empower individuals to translate thoughts into captivating copy, visuals, videos, or even 3D environments — with just a few prompts — the potential for generative AI is huge. This is especially significant in visual mediums like digital signage.

Ultimately, eye-catching content is fundamental to engaging your audience. AI not only creates these interesting visuals at speed, and in high volumes, but also streamlines a multitude of the processes that surround digital signage content.

Discovering the efficiencies

For example, AI can seamlessly incorporate your brand identity into any new content it creates, effectively addressing the challenge of maintaining brand consistency across signage.

Another area of streamlining is automatic content tagging. Typically, users face the dilemma of forgetting where assets are stored or struggling with labelling on their content management systems. This slows down the process of preparing and publishing content on digital signage systems.

While some CMS platforms have attempted to tackle this issue with manual tagging, it often falls short simply because it relies on a person to remember to complete the tags. Generative AI offers a potential solution by automatically tagging content based on its themes or visual attributes, simplifying the organisational process and taking a time-consuming manual task off an employee’s workload.

Looking beyond the visual

On top of efficiency gains and creative images, generative AI has the potential to elevate digital signage beyond a purely visual medium. This is thanks to AI-synthesised audio narration — a feature which can automatically convert digital signage content into an audio format.

Incorporating audio into this type of signage content allows audiences to consume information through listening rather than reading, catering to scenarios such as driving, public transport commutes, or walks to work. The versatility of AI-synthesised audio narration also makes digital signage more accessible to those who may not have been able to enjoy the content before.

Exercising caution

While it still in its nascent stage when it comes to digital signage — and in more general terms— generative AI is opening up huge new possibilities for the world of AV.

When looking at the bigger picture, automatic corporate branding, content tagging, and AI-synthesised audio narration are just the beginning of how ‘Gen AI’ will shape how we work, live, and consume content in the future. But we must proceed with caution.

There are naturally some concerns associated with the use of AI. From security of data to ethical considerations, like potential biases being reflected in content production, AV providers need to have strong guardrails in place before they jump in feet first.

At Kinly for example, we prefer an opt-in policy, ensuring that an individual or organisation’s data is not used unless they give their explicit consent. This is just one aspect of practicing the safe use of Gen AI and as it continues to grow, Kinly will continue to adapt its approach to ensure innovation doesn’t come at the expense of security.