Challenge
A global entertainment and media group known for managing multi-genre artists, producers, and content creators was rapidly expanding its business lines—from music and live events to film, digital media, and sports. The firm’s operations had become increasingly complex, with knowledge trapped in disconnected team silos and outdated systems. Creative assets, licensing terms, and strategic insights were scattered across cloud folders, emails, and individual knowledge bases, making collaboration inefficient.
With a talent roster and business portfolio growing faster than internal knowledge systems could scale, the company’s executives faced a growing bottleneck: creative and operational teams were wasting hours searching for past contracts, campaign playbooks, and licensing precedents. This led to repeated work, slower time to market, and missed monetization opportunities.
“We had tribal knowledge stored in people’s heads or buried in decades of email threads. We couldn’t move fast enough, especially when launching new projects that crossed business units. The frustration was palpable.”
Solution
After exploring traditional knowledge management and enterprise search tools that fell short of capturing the nuance of creative work, the company adopted Accrete’s Knowledge Engine platform. The goal: automate knowledge capture and activate insight across departments—without the need for heavy technical lift or training.
Using Accrete’s Knowledge Engine, they built a bespoke Expert AI Agent, nicknamed Backstage, designed to support three critical workflows:
- Rights & Licensing Intelligence: The agent ingested historical contracts, usage terms, and publishing deals to create a dynamic, queryable knowledge graph that could interpret complex licensing scenarios and flag conflicts or monetization opportunities. This work proactively surfaced licensing conflicts and monetization gaps, helping avoid an estimated $500K annually in potential legal exposure and missed revenue opportunities.
- Creative Campaign Reuse: Marketing teams used the AI agent to find and adapt high-performing campaign assets and strategies across genres, brands and external social media data—cutting concept-to-launch timelines in half and improving engagement with content.
- Artist & Partner Insights: Business development teams leveraged the engine to surface strategic insights from performance data, tour history, social listening inputs, and prior negotiations—enabling more personalized, data-informed deal-making that matched up-and-coming artists with the right brand partners.
Because the Knowledge Engine unified structured and unstructured data, learns from user interaction, and retains tacit knowledge over time, its Expert Agent became a trusted digital collaborator across legal, creative, and business teams.
“Unlike static knowledge bases or generic chatbots, this agent feels like a teammate—it anticipates the context and adapts with us. It’s like having a creative strategist and legal analyst on call 24/7.”
Results
Since deployment, the entertainment group has:
- Reduced time spent on contract research by 71%, enabling the legal team to support twice as many deals.
- Accelerated campaign development by 63%, with marketing teams reusing and remixing successful assets from across business units.
- Shortened deal cycles and improved forecasting accuracy, as sales reps partner with the Prospecting Expert Agent andKnowledge Engine to prep faster and identify gaps in competitive intelligence.
The system has become a trusted source of ground truth, helping new hires onboard quickly while preserving the deep institutional knowledge of long-time team members.
“This AI agent doesn’t just retrieve information—it reasons with it. That’s the difference. We’re finally scaling our knowledge, not just our data, and every time we interact with it, it gets better." By capturing tacit knowledge and making it queryable, the system preserved institutional expertise—reducing project delays from staff turnover by an estimated 40%.
Takeaway
The company’s transformation leader credits their success to starting with a clear, high-impact use case that was directly related to its strategic goals: cross-team licensing decisions. From there, they expanded iteratively, letting the agent grow in expertise alongside users.
“AI doesn’t replace our judgment—it amplifies it. For us, the secret was embedding AI where people already work, and letting it learn the patterns that define our business.”