At the Cannes Corporate Media and TV Conference and Awards this week, London-based production agency Toast unveiled StoryX, an AI-powered pre-production platform designed to help brands uncover authentic stories and cast physical on-screen talent that resonates with audiences.

Built in-house at Toast, StoryX blends machine learning with actual, human editorial oversight, mining data sources to help bring corporate stories to life. Traditionally these voices would have remained undiscovered or proved hard for research teams to find.

Many of the other speakers at the Cannes Corporate Media & TV conference highlighted examples where AI tools were used in the post-production space, including a session on content creation from AIO’s Agnieszka Pajak and a well-received talk from Peter Schels of Al Dente on the role of AI in employer Brand.

Toast’s StoryX tool has already been trialled across the agency’s client base, which includes Nokia, BBC Storyworks and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

As Sophie Bell, Toast’s managing director said, “Creative uses of AI are often criticised for moving us all towards sameness. We've developed StoryX to use AI to do the opposite – to champion authenticity”