The 2026 State of Real-Time Workflows report, produced by Perforce in partnership with AWS, surveyed more than 600 practitioners across game development, media and entertainment, and automotive and manufacturing. Two structural shifts stand out.
Hybrid cloud adoption has accelerated sharply. 27% of respondents now run a hybrid cloud-and-on-premises server setup, up from 10% in 2025 and 16% in 2024. Cloud-only and on-premises-only configurations have each declined as the leading model. The shift suggests organisations are treating the cloud-vs-on-prem binary as a false choice rather than a permanent architecture decision.
On AI, the data separates productivity from sentiment. Media and entertainment and automotive and manufacturing respondents lead in both AI usage and measurable payoff — 48% and 41% respectively saw productivity climb 11–50% after adopting AI. But the concerns run parallel to the gains. Job insecurity tops the AI-related concern list at 50% globally, ahead of content quality worries (49%), compliance concerns (48%), and fears that AI is reducing creativity (36%). LATAM and North American respondents report the deepest anxieties around AI-driven job displacement at 83% and 56% respectively. APAC leads in reported AI-driven acceleration at 74%.
"AI is making teams faster, but faster doesn't necessarily mean better," said Brent Schiestl, Senior Director of Product Management at Perforce. "The same industries seeing some of the biggest productivity gains are also worried about compliance and content quality. As AI drives an explosion in digital assets, the competitive advantage won't come from creating more content; it will come from knowing where that content came from, how it changed, and whether you can trust it."
Version control adoption reached 94% this year, up from 86% in 2025 — a sign that as AI generates more content at higher velocity, governance tooling is following. Game engines have expanded well past their original context: 55% of media and entertainment respondents use them for film and television production, and 32% for VFX.
The funding environment is a separate constraint. 35% of respondents cited funding as their biggest organisational challenge, ahead of collaboration (24%). 26% said leadership pressure has increased as AI adoption accelerates — a figure that maps to the gap between what executives expect AI to deliver and what production teams are navigating on the ground.
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