JULY 2026
Much of the discussion around AI in entertainment focuses on replacing creative work - writing scripts, generating dialogue or creating images. Through Endeavour, however, I've found myself asking a different question: can AI make persistent, simulation-driven experiences practical enough to become operationally and commercially viable?
Traditional digital experiences are largely self-contained. Games ship with fixed narratives, television episodes are produced individually, and training scenarios are often designed for a single purpose before being reset or replaced. Endeavour explores a different model: a persistent simulation where new missions can be introduced continuously into an evolving world.
Making that practical is less about replacing creativity than reducing the operational complexity behind the experience.
One area we're exploring is mission preparation. Human creators continue to develop the narrative, while AI helps translate it into a playable mission by generating scenario data, mapping events into the simulation and creating many of the supporting assets needed to bring each mission to life - everything from strange new phenomenon to alien spacecraft.
We're also exploring how AI can simplify live mission operations. Early thinking suggested each mission would require several operators managing different simulation systems alongside a mission director. Increasingly, we're finding AI may be able to automate much of that orchestration, allowing a single mission director to oversee experiences that would previously have required a much larger production team.
Perhaps the most interesting opportunity lies in participation. One of Endeavour's core ideas is that audiences shouldn't simply watch a story - they should be able to participate in it from anywhere in the world. Remote participants might analyse sensor data, suggest tactical responses or re-route power while watching the on-screen crew live. AI may offer a way of aggregating those thousands of individual contributions, identifying the strongest ideas and surfacing them to the on-screen crew at the moment they're needed.
For me, that's where AI becomes genuinely interesting. Not as a substitute for creativity, but as part of the infrastructure that allows entirely new forms of participation, collaboration and persistent digital experiences to become operationally and commercially sustainable. Whether the environment is entertainment, education, defence or research is almost secondary. The more interesting question is whether AI can make this new category of digital experience practical enough to exist at all. That's the question Endeavour is helping us explore, with science fiction providing the ideal experimental environment in which to test the idea.