Video Killed the Radio Star -- And what we can do about it

My remarks for the NAMT and LORT conferences - October 2025

Best read after revisiting the Buggles’ 1979 hit, Video Killed the Radio Star

Come with me for a few minutes on a journey back to 1987 – or, whatever year it was when you were ten. Go ahead, do the math, settle in, close your eyes if you wish. If you’ve already had too much coffee to close your eyes, or if you haven’t had enough and there’s a chance you might nod off, keep them open please. Am I an ancient to you? Or a child? Doesn’t matter – go to your age ten, the exercise will still work.

It’s Saturday afternoon, right around this time of year, let’s call it October. I’m in Long Beach, California, at that moment in history, home to the Long Beach Civic Light Opera, where I cut my stage teeth as General Bullmoose in a youth production of Lil’ Abner. And Avery in Charlotte’s Web and Sid in Pajama Game and Curly in Oklahoma. Somewhere in there, I took an understudy role with a promise to appear alongside Charles Durning and Hope Lange in On Golden Pond. But, over a 27-performance run I never once got a shot to take the stage. And that heartbreak is why I stand before you here today as a consultant, not an actor.

Ok, so where are you? What show were you in that summer, that summer you were ten?

For this next part of the journey, you’re going to have to get on your bike to come with me, so go ahead – what was it? A pink Schwinn with a banana seat and golden tassles? Go ahead, brush her off. We’re going on a ride.

We head out, ratty backpack over the shoulder as Mom waves us off because, what could possibly happen to a ten-year-old alone on a bike in the middle of California’s fifth most populous city? This was before helicopter moms – we were free range. Plus, she’s happy we’re on our way – finally out of the house, on a very specific mission.

Twenty minutes later, we find our way inside. We flash our card at the front desk, hustle through the turnstile, eyes adjusting under the fluorescent glow, the tender quiet all around. A quick stop at the fountain and then over to the card catalogue where we begin our thumbing through a thousand dogeared cards to find, is that the one? Ok, yeah that’s the one. Let’s do this. Jot down that number carefully now.

45 minutes into our journey, we’ve made it to the librarian. She’s been waiting for this number, and boy have we been waiting to get it to her. We begin our final leg, one last long walk to the stacks, around this corner, over this kid’s legs in the aisle, down this one, around the corner to an aisle with a light out overhead until…well here we are, we’ve arrived. Scanning, now scanning, slowly until yes, there it is, the World Book Encyclopedia, volume 14, “N and O”.

Finally with the goal in sight, we’re proud of our hard-fought conquest, here nearly an hour later, sweaty, exhausted, exhilarated as we arrive at our data, the data we need to ace our first major fifth grade assignment, the gross domestic product of New Jersey in, what year was this published? 1980? Seven years ago? Well, we’ll work with what we’ve got, that will have to do. 81.3 billion is the number we’ve been looking for. At least, that’s best answer we can get today, after seventy minutes of grimy adventure and exhaustion. We did it.

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This is the world into which most of us were born, were raised – the world that set our expectations for the relationship between work, energy, risk and reward. This world, the world of working those rabbit ears on the Zenith to dial in those precious eight stations. Of showing up just on time to catch the Huxtables or to figure out who shot J.R. This world, where to escape boredom, to retrieve the GDP of New Jersey, to have your mind blown – you had to leave home. Where, to have a life, you had to go out —to theaters, concerts, libraries, churches, the circus—because that’s where the world lived. And you weren’t going to get it unless you got off the couch and mustered your way into the action.

This way of living, of thinking, of striving and of consuming dominated until, for practical purposes, it began to crack in 2001, just twenty some years ago, when, for the first time, a majority of Americans had some dial-up internet service in their homes. In 2007 it changed again, when over 50% of Americans had broadband in their homes. And, once again, in perhaps the most important moment in the history of our profession, in 2013, when smartphone ownership passed the 50% mark according to the Pew Research Center.

What’s transpired since then is a tidal wave of change in human behavior and consumer sentiment that I believe we still struggle to grasp, or accept, and that I believe remains the fundamental stressor in our field, a stressor which will accelerate dramatically in the next three years as AI proceeds to finally pulverize any remaining gap between human desire for stimulation and information, and the satisfaction of that desire.

As AI advances it will create insatiable expectations society-wide for god-level customer service and consumer experience, and our sector will not be immune. In fact, in many ways, our sector will be the canary in the coalmine for this paradigm shift – we have a lot to lose, and an even greater amount to gain – and our outcome in this next ten years will rely upon our ability to understand, anticipate and manage what is to come.

When the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” became the very first music video played on MTV on August 1, 1981, they may have somewhat overstated the case – though not for poor Christopher Cross, who never topped the charts again. But they did not overstate the paradigm shift underway. “Pictures came and broke your heart” they sang “put the blame on VCR”; “In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind we’ve gone too far”. Their tune tried to put a shape on something just forming, still somewhat ineffable, but nonetheless concretely real – that the world we knew was changing, that something new had come along that would displace and diminish, if not replace, its predecessor. That a true paradigm shift was underway.

Today, we know there are equally profound shifts underfoot. For me, three paradigm shifts – consumer expectation, AI, and the Trump two era – inform most everything we do together in this work: the way we produce, plan, educate, and engage. Today, I want to define these shifts, outline what they mean for the arts — especially theater — highlight where our peers are meeting these challenges head-on, and suggest ways we might work together through collective strategies powerful enough to turn these shifts to our advantage.

1. Consumer Expectation

Let’s start with a look at the American Time Use Survey, which talks with us about how Americans use their time today as different than forty years ago. We’re going to focus on four trends:

Live Arts Attendance – This category has remained almost flat—hovering at an average of about 1 to 2 minutes a day, or 6-12 hours per year—for forty years. In percentage terms, there’s been a small uptick, but the overall level is so minimal that it’s dwarfed by every other leisure activity.

In-person Socializing—this is the dark brown bar declining from left to right. In 1985, Americans spent about 50 minutes, each day socializing face-to-face. By 2024, it had dropped nearly 30% to just 35 minutes, revealing a steady and substantial reduction in in-person connection.

Reading—find the yellow bar. Time spent reading for pleasure has decreased from about 23 minutes a day in 1985 down to just 16 minutes in 2024. That’s a decline of more than 30%.

Finally Total Device Time is in, you guessed it, Green. In 1985, nearly no time was spent on digital screens—just one minute a day. Fast forward to 2024, and that red bar soars to 4.5 hours per day—a staggering increase of more than 4000%.

Today the average American spends most of their discretionary time at home, on screen, and alone. In an unnerving development, just yesterday, Colleen Dilenschneider and her team at Know Your Own Bone reported that what she calls high-propensity visitors, or people who are inclined to visit and actually do visit cultural organizations report yet another uptick in preference this year to stay home, rather than go out, with an increase amongst this cohort of 79% since 2011. Whereas we once left home to find a life, the opposite is now true for most Americans, even for those inclined to attend.

The National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) helps us focus in on theater, and, as you well know, the trends broadly mirror those in the Time Use Survey. In 1985, 17 percent of American adults attended a non-musical play and 12 percent attended a straight play in the previous year. By 2017, attendance at musicals had remained fairly steady, at 16.5 percent, but straight play attendance had fallen to 9.4 percent. In 2022, figures affected by the pandemic convey a drop to 10.3 percent for musical attendance and 4.5 percent for straight play attendance. Sunil Iyengar of the NEA has suggested that these figures are likely to rebound to closer to their 2017 levels when the Endowment conducts its next reading in 2027.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators, published just this year, also echo this finding: 65% of US Adults report no engagement with theater during the period studied, 64% report no engagement with visual arts, while participation in dance was somewhat higher, with just 58% reporting no engagement.

SMU DataArts’ September 2025 report tells us what that means financially. Even adjusting for inflation, earned revenue across the nonprofit arts sector remains far below pre-pandemic levels. Attendance has not recovered.

And we know that 2025 has been hard for new Broadway productions, with none of last year’s 18 productions yet reaching profitability, versus an average of approximately 20%.

It is difficult to look at this data and suggest that any of this is anomalous, or that it might get better on its own. It is tough to swallow.

So, I think most of us are asking, what the hell has been going on? What’s caused this?

But even if we understand and accept that it has happened, it’s not enough. We need to know, are we able to fight this? If so, doing what, for how long? Should we fight it? Or do we need to get with it, manage it, and find a way to leverage it?

Mind Change and Meaning

Perhaps the most compelling theory I’ve come across for how to grapple with this change is what Oxford-based Baroness Susan Greenfield calls “mind change.” Greenfield argues that just as climate change has reshaped the planet’s weather systems, the rise of digital technology – and specifically its tidal wave of information and visual stimulus – has physically reshaped our neurological climate. Greenfield’s science suggests that our brains actually respond differently to stimulus today than they did twenty years ago, and that they require ever more stimulus to generate the same level of excitement. Constant connectivity and screen exposure has physically rewired the brain’s capacity for sustained attention, empathy, and reflection. In his recent book titled “The Anxious Generation: How the great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”, Jonathan Haidt continues this thinking to show how this has especially affected young people—how the “phone-based childhood” has led to crises in mental health, social connection, and creativity.

These theorists argue that these shifts are not abstract. They are literal, biological transformations. I am arguing that our audiences are not exempt. Not today’s audiences, and certainly not tomorrow’s audiences.

So, where does this leave us? How should we approach these broad, sociological changes – changes which can often feel overwhelming?

I’m thinking about this in two ways – one is about product, and the other is about experience.

First, on product, I think we need to be as clear as possible about who is walking through our door, who is not, and what they want from us. I think this has implications both for artistic directors and for executive directors.

As I’m working through this question with our peers nationwide, I’m focusing with them on content strategies for three segments of our audience, segments I expect some of you also think of as the core, the inclined non-attender, and the initiate.

The core are our true believers, our subscribers, our long-time donors. Many of them are older and had their wiring set before this technological transformation. Some of them are younger but, like me and many of you, I suspect, were raised in the theater. Even though they are equally subsumed by this technology tsunami, we likely do not need to significantly modify our product or the experience we offer them. They are likely to continue buying what we’ve been selling, as is, until they’re no longer able to come to the theater. We need this group of stalwarts to bring their friends. We need this group to come more next season than last season – if they came twice last year and we can get them to come three times this year – for bottom line purposes, that is as good as finding a new patron altogether.

The challenge is that we know that we lost some of this group during the pandemic, and that they are likely never coming back. And we know that a generation of individuals we’d hope would replace them has had little to no arts education, and, most likely, parents who took them to the theater less and less over that period of decline. I suspect this has left us with a dwindling base upon which to call for support of our historical product.

The initiates are those Americans – the vast majority of Americans – who rarely, if ever, engage with the theater at all. I think most of us have considered this segment the holy grail – if we could just negotiate our way into their lives, not only would we fill our houses but we’d fulfill our mission to develop new audiences for theater as well.

We’ve tried a lot to get this group to pay attention to what we have to offer. They’ve been sought through celebrity-driven spectacle. They are often the focus of our educational and community-engaged programming. We build promotions and partnerships with people and organizations they like and trust in an effort to get them to try us out.

Many of our peers have designed new forms of programming for them, and have experimented with what I would call programming ritual. Here I might create a bucket that, broadly speaking, contains immersive theater; attractions like the Donkey Show; Sleep no More; Then She Fell; the work of Blume Studios at Blumenthal Arts; aspects of Armory and Shed programming; productions like Here Lies Love; Long Wharf’s site specific productions; Meow Wolf and Cirque-style attractions – really any theatrical experience that presses the boundaries of ritual, location, and engagement that clearly seek to exploit the experience economy and that do not fight but go with the flow toward highly mediated, super saturated, digitally enriched environment that has a truly spectacular, “cannot get this at home or anywhere else” appeal.

The rapid rise in popularity of this type of narrative driven engagement would suggest that the majority of initiates – that 60% plus of Americans over 18 who rarely if ever go to the theater – may be looking to engage with something theatrical, but that they’re looking for a largely new form of product.

New World Symphony in South Beach undertook a series of experiments about a decade ago aimed at understanding this phenomenon. They mounted 20-minute concerts and charged not $50, or $25 but $2.50; they built orchestral experiences lasting from 9pm to 1am, combining them with electronic dance music, dancing and booze; they backstopped chamber music concerts with electrifying video and visual content; they combined yoga classes with streaming concerts outside on the wall of their Frank Gehry Palace. What our colleagues found was that they did indeed attract audiences that had never given the traditional orchestra experience much attention, and that these audiences were in fact first time visitors, younger and more racially diverse. They were initiates. Management also ultimately conceded that no matter how they tried, they could not get many from this group to buy regular season tickets for Brahms, Beethoven and Bruckner. The analysis suggested reconciliation to the idea that to attract a substantially new audience – lets’ say digital natives, with a different orientation toward attention, toward digital media, and interaction – a new product would need to be built, but that chances were low that audience would easily, if ever, migrate to the core product. That the future of the orchestra may be the work of presenting multiple products for multiple different audiences. I think if a well-funded study were conducted in the experiential theater, we’d be likely to find much the same result – that audiences for Punch Drunk are not the same audiences for straight Chekhov.

The third group is the Inclined Non-Attender: those who go to other theaters, the museum, the symphony—but are just not yet coming to see us. It’s on this group that I place the most focus for the most growth for most theaters. Whereas to reach initiates we may need new forms of programming, with inclined non-attenders, who are more in nature like our core, I think our marketing and engagement teams have a great shot of building the promotions, partnerships, and collaborations to draw these future core audiences to our fold. This group doesn’t need to be reprogrammed – it needs to be seduced. When we look at the reach of most small and midsized theaters and their current capture of audiences inclined toward theater in their market, they are only reaching a small percentage of that inclined base, many in the 3 to 7 percent range. So, after getting our core to increase their attendance this year over last, focusing on the inclined buyer represents the clearest path toward increased audience numbers in the shortest period of time. For this group, it’s less about converting new people to the theater than converting more theater people to our theater. Looking at it this way, in the near term, many theaters have a ways to go in converting the arts people in their communities to their product, before worrying about initiates. When thinking like a marketer, this is always my first focus for audience acquisition; this does not entirely fulfill our mission, but it does help fill seats.

While I think audience growth in the next ten years, in most markets, can focus on deepening relationships with the core and inclined non-attenders, when I look at these collapsing trendlines I’m haunted by the notion that the number of inclined buyers for our traditional experience is shrinking. I think that is a reality we need to address as we look ahead.

I for one am not certain that a revival of traditional arts education is the answer to the audience problem. I do think that arts education is critical, but I am troubled by the notion that it will not be as powerful and pervasive as the role digital devices now play in the lives of our children. I think we may need to concede that over time, our core product will need to adapt along with the way in which digital technologies are rewiring the human brain – that our future likely looks like new products for new audiences, alongside our core product for true believers. I think the balance of this mix, a hybrid between core experience and initiate digital native programming and ritual, will vary depending on many factors unique to each organization and its environment, but I think this is the only reasonable assumption of where we are headed, based on the data.

The second area upon which I’m vigorously focused is enriching the total theater-going experience, and specifically how to increase positive friction and reduce negative friction for all three segments. In other words, how to make going out to the theater as exhilarating and rewarding as possible. Here I am focusing on things that we can do throughout the consumer pathway to reduce inconvenience and discomfort, and to increase value and comfort, as levers in our relationship with expectation.

At the start I want to address digital streaming, because this is one way our sector has contemplated reaching new audiences and reducing the effort required to consume our experience, and I know that some are placing increased attention on live streaming technology. I know I may earn some scorn in the room, but I remain skeptical that digital distribution, of nearly any kind, will be serious part of our future. At least not digital distribution of the product we create today. I think most of us would agree that our product does not, by and large, translate well via video to a home screen, and we also know we cannot compete with Hollywood production values. Admirable even necessary efforts during the pandemic did not turn into lasting and profitable programs; in fact, most of them lost serious money. There are a few exceptions, but even the most well capitalized, longest-running efforts in this experiment have failed to produce convincing results.

I know I am not alone in this room in stating that the essential value of the experience we offer is the physical immediacy of our product. We all believe this intuitively but the science here is also pretty compelling. A 2017 study at University College London found that during a live performance of Dreamgirls on the West End, audience members exhibited synchronized heart rates, noting that their pulses sped up and slowed down at the same rate. Another 2022 study used EEG technology to identify that brainwave synchrony among audience members was greater when they experienced strong musical pleasure, and, importantly when they were physically close together. The report states and I quote “The closer the people were physically the more similar their emotional reports were. More importantly the closer they were the higher was the cerebral synchrony when they were reporting high levels of pleasure related to the music.” Yet another study of 132 concertgoers in Berlin found that audience members’ breathing rates, heart rates and sweat levels synchronized during a classical music concert. Research published in the National Communication Association Journal established the concept of mirror-neuron theory, which explains that observing another’s bodily action activates similar neural systems in the observer, in other words that “when we observe someone performing an action, there is a concurrent activation of motor circuits by the mirror neurons that are also used by us when we perform similar actions.” And additional studies in 2025 have illustrated that oxytoxin – the bonding chemical – increases and cortisol levels decrease when individuals engage in group singing. We all know intuitively that the live encounter with performance produces a unique human experience and that this is our unique value proposition. This doesn’t happen when we watch a livestream at home, and the science backs it up.

I’m a father of three Disney-aged girls, and so I’ve had the opportunity to visit the Magic Kingdom a few times in the last several years. If you haven’t been recently, let me talk with you about how Disney – in the context of a lot of bad press about ticket pricing and becoming unaffordable for most families – is dealing with positive and negative friction. Using AI, Disney has created an in-app experience called the Genie. As you prepare from home for your monumentally expensive visit, The Genie asks you questions about which rides and experiences are most important to you. Then it works to develop an itinerary for you that maps your desired experiences to the layout of the park to ensure your dreams come true. Throughout, they suggest places you might want to eat, opportunities you hadn’t considered – such as meet and greets with characters if you are taking little ones with you – and even locations of restrooms. For an upcharge, you can load all your tech onto a Genie Band that makes scanning tickets and making purchases. Disney has begun taking pictures of you, whether you like it or not, in circumstances you cannot take a picture of yourself, like screaming down Space Mountain At the end of the day, the Genie allows you to download these photographs – for $75. The Lightning Pass also comes at an upcharge, allowing you to reserve your place in line for the most in-demand rides, saving a half hour or more several times throughout the day. These items are expensive – like several hundred dollars, and appeal to families who want to decrease negative friction at any cost. And people are paying for them.

There are a dozen other ways in which Disney is decreasing negative friction and increasing positive friction. I think we need to be thinking in exactly the same way when it comes to engaging with our audiences, especially initiates who have a very low tolerance for inconvenience and a very high threshold for expected experience. I will not forget my years working at the Kennedy Center, and the experience of going to the opera in those once-grand halls. While I often benefitted from comps I also could not avoid practicing the expense math around me. At the center, one could quite easily spend $750 and six hours of one’s life on an evening out. Two tickets at $250 including fees; a nice dinner; parking; concessions. While the marketing and executive teams at the center during my time there were without peer, I was always haunted by what I felt was an underwhelming positive friction. The only human contact was quite anonymous and cold – rushed box office personnel, cool ticket scanners and harried concessionaires. At a moment in human history when we’ve come to expect extremely high return on investment from each expenditure, after six hours out and $750 later, all I had, if I were lucky, was a memory. There were very few opportunities for positive friction within that consumer journey.

This inspired me to begin thinking about how more positive friction could be achieved in every consumer journey. I dreamed of a genius bar in the lobby, where one could pull up a stool or a bean bag and chat with the dramaturg or associate music director about the evening’s concert. I wondered – for those who’d already paid $40 to park their car, would they pay another $40 to have it washed while they enjoyed their evening? A Whole Foods had recently opened up in Foggy Bottom. Would it make sense to allow patrons to have groceries delivered to their car while they enjoyed Tosca? How could we make the evening out not only entertaining but useful? How could we build in three or four moments of positive friction – above and beyond the performance itself – that would load the journey with reward and celebrate the fact that you are physically present for our work?

This is why restaurants are adding bowling lanes and axe throwing. It’s why our hotel here has a LP record player in each room, and ambiguously credible novels on each shelf. They’re reminding you there’s more here than a bed here, there’s an experience.

I am convinced that to compete with an increasingly sophisticated experience economy, to turn inclined into core, and to attract and retain the initiate, we are going to have to focus intently on decreasing negative friction – any bug in the user experience that disincentivizes participation – and increasing negative friction – adding value throughout the consumer journey. Or, in some cases like the Groundlings experience at Shakespeare’s Globe, perhaps some of you will find ways to combine positive and negative friction and create value from it.

We can’t turn back time, and we shouldn’t turn our back on what makes us special. Consumers expect more from their time and energy than we did in 1987. Yet, most consumer pathways, and a lot of content, looks and feels very much like it did in 1987. I think this framework is the way to approach this question. How can we distinguish between the needs of our core and initiate audiences, and what will our customer journey offer in a year, in five? In ten?

2: AI and a New Humanism

I’d like to turn to the second major paradigm shift I see underway. It’s almost passe to discuss AI at this point as it has become ubiquitous in our sector and in society at large. But we should resist that urge; the ubiquity is for a reason, and our sector has yet to address the good, bad and ugly head on. While early adopters in the corporate sector are announcing huge productivity gains resulting from dedicated AI training and resources a recent Unite.AI study found that while 89% of nonprofits express interest in AI, only 28% have implemented it, with most citing lack of training and strategy as the primary barrier. Our own research suggests that discomfort with change; general overwhelm (not sure where to start); and concerns regarding environmental impact are also important barriers to adoption amongst nonprofit administrators.

This is why, in May of this year our team at the DeVos Institute launched A³: Arts x Admin x AI, a national program designed to help arts, culture, and humanities nonprofits forge a path to use AI in safe, ethical, and efficient ways, focused on back-office operations, and in alignment with their values. We wanted to demystify AI for the arts and help build a pathway to safe, genuinely impactful uses that teams of two and two hundred could adopt.

We are under no illusions that AI is a panacea. Further, we know full well it presents many ethical issues we need to work to sort out, specifically as regards our people, our donors, and the artists we employ onstage and offstage.

But, we also work every day with teams for whom vision and ambition exists in spades, but for whom capacity to execute presents a stubborn constraint. How many of us in this room believe that what stands between us and success in fundraising or marketing or education is one or two more full-time employees? I’d wager that’s most of us in this room. And it’s that phenomenon we wanted to deal with head on through A³.

There are now spades of studies that illustrate gains of up to 40% productivity each the entry-, mid- and executive levels in the corporate context. The question we asked the sector was, what could you do with 40% increased productivity? If you do the math, that means that if three employees were to utilize AI in this way, the yield would be approximate to a fourth employee, without the additional salary.

Before you conclude I’m arguing for a reduction in workforce, let me clarify that point. I am skeptical that AI will present opportunity to reduce our current workforce, at least in the near future, if ever. I think this is different than the corporate sector, and somewhat unique to the arts and culture sector, as we have on average, done so much more than would be reasonably expected from an individual for so long, that what we’re really talking about here is moving back in the direction of a more sustainable workplace for most nonprofit arts employees – focusing less on reducing workforce than decreasing current individual workload on redundant or automatable tasks by four or six or ten hours a week. If what this means is that certain of our team members are able to rebalance in a way that they truly enjoy their time at work, and that some find they have more time available for more substantive work – and specifically the work of building relationships with our public, of thinking through and implementing ways to increase positive friction in the lobby, in the community, on the path from the garage to the box office – that’s the win I’m looking for.

In the future I expect that AI will limit our need for additional entry-level and even some mid-level administrative functions and personnel. Even as our operation grows, we will not need as many people to clean growing data sets, meet patron expectations for segmented communication and customer service, do manual research on donor background, and manually evaluate audience sentiment. Need for personnel to perform entry-level, repetitive functions will definitely shrink. As a result, I’d like to believe that our perennial capacity crunch will lessen somewhat and that we’ll have more time to spend, on balance, doing the things that only humans can do.

That’s why our focus has been on the development of ethical uses of AI, merged with arts insight. Technically, what we’re trying to address is what many of you will understand as cost disease, the structural issue at the heart of all live performance industries. In their landmark 1966 study titled Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, William Baumol and William Bowen observed that while most industries achieve productivity gains through technology—one worker using new technology to produce ten times the output this year than a year before—need for artistic labor in the performing arts – our largest expense – remains essentially constant, no matter how technology improves.

Baumol and Bowen observed that we still need the same number of rehearsals, the same number of actors and musicians, and the same amount of time to stage Hamlet or HMS Pinafore as we did a hundred years ago. But since we only have so many seats in the house, and since we only have so many tickets to sell, earned revenue from ticket sales has failed to keep up with rising expenses, which, in our industry are driven in the majority by salary expense and specifically salaries and fees related to artistic production. In recent years, these increases have been especially profound for many producing organizations nationwide. That means that every year, we need to raise more money just to keep producing the same amount of inventory.

This is the principle at the heart of cost disease, a phenomenon all of us know well and we know this challenge is accelerating.

Through A³, we have sought to test one simple proposition: could AI cut the time it takes to complete essential administrative tasks by 40 percent without sacrificing quality or accuracy? The answer is proving yes — and then some.

While we don’t have time today to unpack all of what we’ve learned through the first five months of this seven-month sprint, here are a few headlines:

- Use of AI should start with the development of a policy for use within your organization that is tied to your values and that protects your data, and that of your patrons in ways mandated by the law, and by your promises to them. We began our program by providing participants with principles and frameworks for developing a values-aligned policy for use of data, and to help them address serious questions such as:

1. How will we remain transparent with staff, artists, audiences, and donors about where and how we are using AI?

2. How will we ensure that use of AI will abide our commitments to equity, diversity, and access in our organization and field?

3. How will we ensure that we are using AI in a way that protects data, respects intellectual property, and safeguards the privacy of artists, audiences, and funders?

4. How will we use AI in adherence with our commitment to environmental sustainability in our production practices?

- Second, the number of ways to use AI are overwhelming. We should pick two or three and master them, and these two or three should attack specific pain points in the arts management “cycle”. For those of you with whom I’ve had the chance to work, you may recognize this Cycle. The way we’ve approached AI is to think about how we can attack specific pain points that repeat time and again. These include daily tasks such as donor research, grant reporting, data entry and analysis, e-comm segmentation, routine customer service inquiries, financial analysis, and social media production. We’ve learned that adopting just one or two AI solutions in each of these areas, and working to integrate them across your staff, can have enormous impacts.

- Lastly, we are grappling with what creative tasks may be accelerated by the use of AI and we are thinking through the ethical considerations surrounding use of AI in creative functions. We are not talking about how to replace composers, actors, directors, or playwrights with AI, but we are looking at how AI can substantially reduce costs around certain forms of media production such as video trailer content production, and ways in which automated audience sentiment analysis may suggest new methods for creative teams to better understand what is hitting the mark with audiences and what is not, and why. As we move forward, we’ll be looking at means to shorten production timeframe, decrease production costs, and increase efficiency in areas that that have historically been impervious to automation.

AI will not solve every problem, and there are certain areas it should not and cannot touch. But I do believe it can finally begin to bend the Baumol curve — allowing us to increase output without proportionate increases in cost. Our sector’s key differentiator is our ability to build relationships, trust, and connection – biological connection – between humans in a room. If AI can reduce the burden of repetition, it can refocus us on the work of connection.

I think this means that the arts workforce of tomorrow will rely more heavily, across an increased proportion of staff, upon the skills of human connection, of humor, of affability, of charisma, and of sincere interest and curiosity about others. I think that more arts professionals will be spending more time engaging with more members of the public, even if that has not historically been their job. I think that this means that a majority of our employees in ten years, relieved of some or all mundane administrative tasks, will be in the value creation business, and in the relationship development business.

For this reason, we should not mourn the loss of perfunctory roles; we should prepare for the rise of a relationship-based workforce. In an AI economy, the most valuable workers will not be the fastest typists, but the most empathetic communicators.

And I think this is likely to be true across many industries, positioning theater educators for a resurgence. We know from social science research that Gen Z is experiencing a measurable decline in face-to-face social skills and interpersonal comfort. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 65% of Gen Z employees reported needing to re-learn social skills after the pandemic, and a 2025 Report by Freeman found that 82% of Gen Z say they need help expressing themselves and being with others in person. Similarly, the American Psychological Association has documented rising rates of social anxiety and loneliness among young people, with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declaring a “loneliness epidemic” in 2023. These trends are attributed in part to the dominance of digital communication and social media in Gen Z’s formative years.

Theater education, in this context, takes on new meaning. Unlike most classroom settings, theater training forces participants to make eye contact, listen deeply, collaborate, and remain present in their bodies—all of which counteract the disembodied habits of screen-based interaction.

The theater educators in the room will know that students entering theater programs with limited social confidence, most often leave with sharpened empathy and heightened ability to connect with peers.

This is why employers across industries continue to prize “soft skills” such as communication, teamwork, and adaptability as top hiring priorities, even in highly technical fields. In fact, LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report ranked communication, leadership, and collaboration as three of the five most in-demand skills worldwide.

Taken together, these trends suggest that theater education is poised for a renaissance, if we can name and measure our outputs in these areas. As more sectors grapple with how to preserve human connection in an AI-driven workplace, the tools of theater—presence, empathy, storytelling, and embodied collaboration—will only become more valuable, not less.

I think we need a national effort in the arts to understand what is going on here and to produce practical, well-funded responses. And I think this work is urgent. We tend to talk about AI as though its transformations will unfold over decades. But credible voices argue that the next five years will see more change than the past fifty and some argue that we could reach a pivotal turning point as soon as next year. Late last year, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI juggernaut Anthropic, wrote a startling treatise titled “Machines of Loving Grace”, which attempted to provide a framework for the rest of us to think about how AI will transform society. In his piece Amodei projects that the power of modern AI will not only reshape what humans do, but also how we know. He argues that generative AI systems, with their ability to produce text, images, and even reasoning chains at scale, represent a step-change in our epistemology and that they will quickly help with everything from curing all known diseases – which he posits will take place in the next ten years – to eliminating need for humans to be involved in virtually any repetitive task by combining agentic AI with humanoid robotics– essentially arguing that anything a human can do today, AI will be able to do better in a matter of years, and in some cases, months. In fact, he argues that we will reach what is commonly referred to as “the singularity” – the moment when artificial intelligence will surpass the capacity of the most intelligent, most capable human – as soon as 2026.

This isn’t just a shift in productivity — it’s a wholesale redefinition of how information is created and stored. One area to focus upon within this mind-bending projection is education. When all intelligence is available, synthesized, and tailored to the individual calling for it, in a millisecond, what will become the role of traditional education? What will our elementary and high schools have left to teach? What will universities have left to teach?

I think the answer is that our education system is likely to become less a venue for the creation and transfer of knowledge but a location where individuals are taught to make sense of what artificial intelligence produces. And this is where I grow optimistic about our future in the arts. If this transpires, I suggest that it will present a once in a century inflection point for the humanities. It ushers forth the possibility that art, theater, and the humanities can reclaim their role as society’s most trusted guides to sense-making, coherence, and meaning in a landscape where those qualities are under siege.

I would go so far as to suggest that if, as Amodei and others project, one of seven Americans has an agentic humanoid robot in their home by 2050, undertaking tasks that today consume tens of hours per week, and if AI has reached the point where it is able to synthesize all available information with the press of a button – if we no longer need to learn medicine or economics or architecture because AI will have made such learning unnecessary – humans may need the humanities more than ever. Why?

Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks is pushing the narrative that we find ourselves in a spiritual malaise as a people not because we lack religion but because we’re not bored often enough. He argues that boredom is “the Cadillac of feelings” and that only when we are bored do we have the bandwidth and the inclination to wrestle with the biggest questions facing us as a species, or as he puts it the “big questions of meaning”. As AI begins to transform society, I suspect many people will find themselves with more time on their hands, and they will have more time to focus on the meaning of life. When this happens – when humans find themselves suddenly bored again, as well as asking new questions about what is human and what is machine – I wager we will see a superbloom of relevance for the humanities. We all wonder about the big questions. We in this room know that there is nothing more helpful than art, than theater, to help us name, and perhaps begin to resolve those questions. When all we have left to sort out are the most important questions facing us as a species, I believe humans will turn to the tools art provides – to understand themselves, others, what is truly human, and how to handle what is not. I think the age of AI will also be a golden age for the arts.

This is why I’m working toward the formation of a think tank on the role of the ats in the age of AI – to provide a focal point for how the arts can leverage AI for administrative gain; understand AI’s likely impacts on the industry in the near and mid-terms; and prepare artists and arts managers to leverage the broad sociological transformation underway for the benefit of the arts. I would suggest that if we position the arts as tools to understand an increasingly overwhelming, spectacular, and automated world, our value as interpreters will not diminish but rather rise with each new AI breakthrough. The question is whether we will be ready for this opportunity when it comes.

3: Toward a National Arts Policy

The third and last paradigm shift I’d like to discuss brings me no pleasure.

We are living through the most consequential, effective and influential arts presidency in American history, one which has fundamentally transformed the relationship between the people’s proxy, the federal government, and our sector.

I hasten to add: not the “most beneficial” presidency, but certainly the most “consequential”, at least since Johnson: characterized by sweeping, impactful actions that have, in a matter of months, reshaped the federal role in culture and begun to instate a new, potent, de facto national arts policy.

This policy is, as yet, undeclared and piecemeal. But pillars of an emergent policy have been forcefully delivered and have introduced serious, widespread implications for our nation’s creative sector.

This room is well-versed in this topic, but to quickly recap some of its least charming developments:

• In August, Executive Order 14344 directed the GSA to favor traditional and classical styles in federal buildings—an explicit aesthetic policy with concrete downstream implications for the public realm, and cultural representation and memory.

• That same month, the White House issued a detailed review of Smithsonian exhibitions and materials, demanding curatorial changes in alignment with the administration’s view of history and cultural values. Correlative action was taken to remove or revise national park signage addressing issues such as climate change and slavery, under the logic of eliminating “improper partisan ideology.” In yet another, similar effort, the Department of Education has announced new preferences for “patriotic education” in discretionary grants, part of a wider effort to realign civics education to the administration’s worldview.

• The FY 26 White House budget proposal again recommends the elimination of the NEA, NEH, and IMLS. While Congress debates their fate, the administration has rewritten their funding criteria; hollowed their staffs; and terminated hundreds of confirmed grants. Executive Orders have been interpreted by the agencies to justify restrictions on speech on specific topics including diversity, equity, inclusion and gender. Regardless of their budgetary fate, the agencies have been reframed as explicitly partisan instruments and their grantmaking is unlikely to look the same for years to come, if ever again.

• Agency funding has in part been redirected toward a revamped National Garden of American Heroes. The $34 million investment will fund 250 life-size statues to memorialize the nation’s political, scientific, athletic, and cultural history. Participating artists will win quite alluring commissions estimated at up to $200,000, and an opportunity to help rewrite the American story for posterity.

• And, to cap this incomplete summary, in February, the Kennedy Center’s board was overhauled through direct intervention by the President, who was, of course, quickly instated as Chairman. Simultaneously the center’s esteemed, visionary, and professional management was replaced by individuals with no professional background in the arts, and for whom administering the national cultural center remains but one of several assignments. The nation’s cultural center is now the backdrop for consequential press conferences; its board meetings, helmed by the President of the United States, make the evening news. Its furnishings and decor are the subject of Presidential comment and are the beneficiary of unprecedented capital investment as prioritized by the President and Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The most powerful office in the world publicly ruminates upon particulars of Broadway history and the Center’s mainstage programming. The leader of the free world will not only select this year’s Kennedy Center honorees but will host the ceremony presenting the most celebrated award in American arts and culture.

When we look at these actions as a whole, I suggest that we must begin to think of them as increasingly articulate, comprehensive effort to define our nation’s official relationship with arts, culture and creativity — in other words, as a nascent national cultural policy, written by Russell Vought and implemented by the President, backed by the full force of the executive branch and a largely complicit, or neutered, Congress. The administration has, albeit in piecemeal, advanced an increasingly clear statement of values, defined those values through policy and program, ensured their implementation by faithful administrators, and backed them with the power of the purse.

In the meantime, our decentralized and diverse sector, two characteristics we value as strengths, has yet to develop a response of a scale, speed, or potency on par with the administration’s efforts. The dissolution of the National Endowments has brought into stark relief the disparate, autonomous and only loosely affiliated nature of our national advocacy organizations, a cluster of national advocates such as AFTA, AAM, TCG, the League of American Orchestras, Opera America, Dance USA, APAP, LORT and others – that formed as a constellation around the Endowments, proudly decentralized and audibly wary, throughout its history, of concentrating too much power in any single entity.

That paradigm’s effectiveness in protecting the best interests of the sector has crumbled before our eyes. And as we debate how to organize, the administration continues to take action to unravel decades of progress in our field.

Several courageous offices have illustrated how resistance can repel some of the administration’s most striking advances, especially those pertaining to free speech.

Critically, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie G. Bunch has countered the administration’s demands for curatorial changes in seven Smithsonian museums by announcing an autonomous internal review. Last month, 100 philanthropies locked arms to rebut the Administration’s efforts to characterize the nonprofit foundation sector as a left-leaning supporter, or perpetrator, of domestic terrorism and political violence. And late last month, in the case of Rhode Island Latino Arts v. National Endowment for the Arts, Federal Judge William Smith found the NEA’s move to penalize projects because that promote “gender ideology” in violation of the First Amendment, because it constitutes viewpoint discrimination. Outside of our sector, the Future Film Coalition is actively working to unite and organize filmmakers, exhibitors, and distributors to defend independent cinema. Universities have begun to organize in collective action to rebuff the administration’s demands to control admissions, faculty choice and curriculum. And in August the National Coalition Against Censorship, along with the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, published a statement called “Cultural Freedom Demands Collective Courage: A Nationwide Statement of Values and Principles for the Field of Arts and Culture.” The document has been signed by over 800 individuals and 250 arts organizations.

History shows what’s possible when loosely affiliated movements find structure. Between 1957 and 1961, a constellation of churches, student groups, and advocacy organizations began to coalesce under the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1963, the Civil Rights Movement had a recognizable architecture, a shared mission, and begun to execute a disciplined set of campaigns. Within years, the Civil Rights Act was law.

I am not comparing our cause to the gravity of the civil rights or anti-poverty struggles. But, the arts sector today is at a similar inflection point—fragmented, disaggregated, yet brimming with unrealized collective power. Movements that repel authoritarianism and change the future of a cause have structure. They organize behind leadership. They adopt a clearly stated platform, and they are implemented through collective action organized through defined campaigns.

Our sector does not yet have any of these, yet we need all of them.

Without question, a high-stakes contest over the formation of a national arts policy is well underway, one in which we find our sector seeking means for coordinated, commensurate response to the swift action of a consolidated and focused power.

The fundamental question of our moment is this: Will the arts in America define their own national policy—or have it defined for them?

Conclusion: The Hybrid Manager

If part one of this talk named the sociology behind our current circumstances, part two argued that AI and the arts can and must find a path forward together, and part three argued for a collective response equal to the moment, this final chapter is what this asks of us.

These three paradigm shifts require that we begin to recharacterize the role of the arts manager in today’s environment. The next generation of leaders must be what I would think of as hybrid managers – working producers and visionary public intellectuals and in the same body. Someone who can manage a board, a budget and a production schedule, but who also can contemplate how AI will change their organization, their city and their sector. Someone who is as adept at discussing the impacts of theater on health and social cohesion as they are finalizing a budget for executive committee review. Someone who is equally at home defending the role of arts in society as they are explaining their mission to a prospect.

This room represents some of the most visionary thinkers in the field. But we won’t stumble into the next generation of leaders. We have to grow it.

This is why I believe we must focus on developing arts leaders with hybrid skill in four areas:

1) Technology and Consumer Expectation – our future leaders need to understand how time‑use has changed, and what this means for program and audience development in the generation ahead. They need to be able to speak with their board members, donors, funders and audiences about these trends and why their institution is uniquely positioned to address them.

2) The Age of AI – our future leaders need to understand AI-infused workflows, policy, ethics, and measurement. They also need to be able to grapple with the changes AI is likely to usher in their organizations and society, and to form a perspective and an effective response to those changes.

3) Deepening connections between the arts and society – our future leaders need to be adept at finding increased connections between our work and other sectors – specifically health, education, and urban development.

And

4) Local and National Arts Policy — our future leaders need frameworks to understand the implications of today’s de facto, if unspoken, national arts policy; how movements take root; effective means of collective action; and steps they can take to protect artists and organizations from encroachments on our civil liberties.

I believe that, while weighty, navigation of this agenda is within our reach. Our sector is no stranger to adversity. In fact, its story is one of remarkable resilience, creativity, and courage. Facing headwinds, for years, many of you have adapted with breathtaking speed, addressing our nation’s most intractable challenges with startling innovation, affirming that the arts are vital civic infrastructure. Today, as we speak our colleagues around the country transcend the tasks of quiet administration to assume their role as visionary, bold futurists creating new value, opportunities for economic growth, and social cohesion.

Let’s close where we began. When I was ten, if I needed a data point, or want to have my mind blown, I knew that significant time, energy, and even some sweat would be involved. Today, almost all human intelligence amassed since the dawn of time has been synthesized by Chat GPT, and is available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, at the price of a simple prompt. Mind blowing, personalized, on-demand entertainment – the likes of which we can hardly conceive of today – will soon arrive, with the same speed and at the same price – which is to say, no cost at all.

Our radio stars lying in state, every where we look.

But I am actually optimistic, perhaps more now than at any time in my career, about our sector and its future.

This week MTV announced that it would discontinue virtually all of its programming in the UK, South America, most of Europe and Australia. At the same time, at the height of music streaming, vinyl record sales have posted their 17th straight year of revenue growth in the U.S., up 10% in 2023 to $1.4 billion. According to the recording industry association of America, RIAA, LP sales increased by 10.3% from 2022 to 2023 alone, growing faster than streaming by 25%.

What’s going on here? Many argue that this surge is due to listeners craving the tangibility of the vinyl experience (the sleeve, the weight); the ritual of loading it into the platform and dropping the needle; the provenance and specifically the liner notes and the artwork; and the sense of community to which they connect via vinyl – the record stores, the listening parties—a series of phenomena that emphasize the human author behind the music and the ecosystem of people who enjoy the music as a community

Vinyl didn’t beat streaming by being more convenient; it thrives alongside streaming by being more human—more curated, more communal, more tangible, more collectible, and more real.

How might we adopt some of vinyl’s lessons? Amidst a sea of infinite digital surrogates, might we begin to think of each production as a limited pressing, bringing back liner notes, celebrating the ritual of concertgoing, creating positive friction throughout our lobbies and common spaces and converting them into hangouts like the record store?

I’d like to think today’s three paradigm shifts provide us means to introduce both our core and new audiences to the pleasures of positive friction only we can provide. Perhaps, as AI makes our lives in some ways simpler and in others more complex, we can usher a new golden age for the humanities, inviting our neighbors to ask and answer the big questions with us. And perhaps, these troubling days for our nation will be a catalyst for our sector to come together like never before, bound not by obligation or distress, but by exciting new frameworks for collective action.

Long live the radio star and the American Theater.

Thank you.