Be more ambitious with video

Welcome to PossibNow. This is a place to learn what AI can help you do, try it on work that matters, and keep the methods that prove useful. In this issue, we’ll explore where video could help you teach, explain, or sell an idea, what research tells us about its value, and how improving AI models give you reason to consider more ambitious possibilities.

Give yourself permission to be more ambitious with video.

Consider the work you want other people to understand. A customer needs to picture the difference your service could make. A colleague needs to grasp why a financial decision matters. A new manager needs to recognize a difficult conversation before she faces one herself.

Each could become a video worth watching. You can show the situation, give it a voice, and let the audience see what happens next.

AI gives us reason to reconsider which of those ideas deserve a chance. In an experiment with management lessons, an ETH Zurich research team made AI-assisted teaching videos in hours, compared with days for its human-made versions. That change in effort invites a larger question about your own work. What would you show people if producing the video became practical?

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What’s Next

We should expand the range of work we consider for video.

Start with the audience and the idea you want them to understand. A moving picture gives you a way to show sequence, demonstrate an interaction, or make an imagined future concrete. For a professional with something useful to explain, that opens up a wide range of possibilities.

Imagine a few uses in your own work:

• Help a customer see the result. Show a day in the customer’s business after a proposed change. Follow the person who gets the benefit, from the first task to the finished result.

• Give a difficult concept a visible form. Let a finance team watch how a delayed payment moves through a cash-flow scenario. Animate the relationship you keep trying to explain in a spreadsheet.

• Teach judgment through a situation. Show a manager handling the same customer complaint in two different ways. Give the audience a moment to consider what they would say next.

• Make a proposal easier to discuss. Give colleagues a short visual account of a new service, office layout, or customer experience. Let them react to something they can picture together.

• Put your expertise within reach. Imagine a small collection of explanations for the questions customers ask most often, with different examples for different audiences.

• Explore a more memorable way to teach. Consider a story, a visual analogy, or even a short musical explanation when the subject and audience would benefit.

These are ideas to explore. In the Friday issue this week, I’ll walk you through how to put this into practice, with prompts and examples. The opportunity starts when you let yourself consider video early enough to shape the explanation.

You know which questions matter, where people get confused, and what makes an example convincing. Bring that judgment to choosing what the audience should see.

Useful now

These readings connect video to teaching and persuasion. They include older research worth returning to as production becomes more accessible.

Give people an explanation they can revisit

Researcher Michael Noetel explains why pacing and structure matter. His summary draws on a review of 105 randomized studies involving 7,776 university students. Adding video to teaching produced a larger average learning benefit than replacing existing teaching with video.

For professional work, consider an explanation someone can pause at the difficult part and revisit before a decision. A short animation of a process could accompany your conversation and give the listener another way to understand the sequence.

See what AI can contribute to teaching

Torbjørn Netland’s account of the ETH experiment describes four management lessons and an online experiment with 447 participants. The researchers found no statistically significant difference in exam results between the two conditions, although participants preferred the human-made videos. Teachers checked the AI scripts, and a curator assembled the videos.

That gives you a concrete example of using AI to prepare an explanation while bringing your expertise to the material. Think about the concept a customer or colleague needs to understand before your next conversation.

Help someone imagine using what you sell

An American Marketing Association essay by Gizem Ceylan, Kristin Diehl, and Wendy Wood examines research on helping people mentally simulate a future purchase or experience. Across more than 50 studies, the average behavioral effect was small; the authors identify stronger approaches that combine visuals with verbal guidance, including interactive formats.

The useful creative question is what your audience needs help imagining. A consultant could illustrate a proposed customer journey. A founder could show the moment a new service becomes useful. The viewer needs a recognizable situation and a reason to care about the outcome.

Show the product doing something useful

A study of product presentation videos compared videos showing product use with videos showing appearance. In experiments with kettles and canvas shoes, usage videos increased stated purchase intention. Low product ratings removed that advantage in the second experiment.

For a professional presentation, take the question of use seriously. Let the viewer follow someone solving a problem. A demonstration can make the value easier to assess, while the underlying offer still has to earn the buyer’s trust.

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What’s possible

Revisit an idea you had ruled out

Filmmaker Kévin Mendiboure’s account of making Catacombs shows what expanded ambition can look like. He returned to a film idea he had held for ten years and used AI to create it. He reports 3,229 image and video generations and 242 hours of work.

The achievement reflects both new tools and substantial creative effort. Apply the same question at the scale of your work. Is there an explanation, demonstration, or story you abandoned because you could not see a practical way to produce it?

Give an explanation a different form

In The Dot and the Swarm, Ethan Mollick describes asking AI to explain the Bitter Lesson through a music video. He reports that the agents made the lyrics, music, and coded visuals from one prompt without further feedback.

The example invites a broader range of teaching ideas. You could explore how rhythm, a recurring character, or a visual story might help someone remember a difficult concept. The form should serve the explanation and suit the audience. A playful treatment may work well for one subject and distract from another.

Direct a scene with more than a text prompt

The Seedance 2.0 research report describes a model that combines text, image, audio, and video references and generates sound and picture together. Its reported generation range runs from four to fifteen seconds.

References give a professional more ways to communicate an idea for a scene. You can indicate a visual setting, movement, or sound instead of relying entirely on a written description. Connected short scenes could support an explanation or a proposal; selecting and assembling them remains part of making a useful finished video.

Look at what the models can represent

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index examines video generation in its technical-performance chapter. Its discussion includes research in which Veo 3 improved on Veo 2 across quantitative visual tasks, including tests beyond ordinary filmmaking. It also records continuing problems with physical plausibility and consistency across scenes.

For professional communication, watch how well a model can show a process, maintain the same objects, and follow a relationship through time. Those capabilities could make more ambitious visual explanations useful. When a video teaches how something works, the explanation must survive closer inspection than an attractive frame.

The loop this week

Choose one idea from your work that you would like someone else to understand, remember, or seriously consider. Imagine the video you would want them to watch. Picture the opening scene, what changes as they watch, and what they should understand at the end.

Give the idea enough room before deciding how to produce it. You may discover a clearer way to explain something you already know well.

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