At Pier59, NYC's Creative Industry Tests the Future of AI

With the film and broadcast industry in town for NAB Show New York, ASUS ProArt turned one of the city’s most advanced production stages into a room for talking about AI, compute and the future of creative work.

The night

On October 21, a full house filled Studio C at Pier59 Studios on the Chelsea waterfront for ProArt Creator Connect: NYC. The space is a virtual production stage: a curved LED wall that replaces green screens with live digital backdrops. For one evening it did double duty as stage, gallery and showroom.

The guest list matched the room. Filmmakers, editors, VFX artists and creators mixed with the people who buy and build the technology behind them. It was a reminder that New York’s tech scene runs well beyond startups and funding rounds.

On stage

Matt Gregory of RedShark Media and Yen Hoang of ASUS North America opened the night. Before a word about hardware, the room got a tour of the stage itself. The LED wall cycled through past projects, showing how the same space becomes a ballpark, a desert or a city street on demand.

The program then moved through ASUS ProArt, NVIDIA, ComfyUI and creator Alex Ziskind on how AI and high-performance computing are reshaping production. An industry panel and talks on creativity and animation closed it out.

ComfyUI drew the strongest reaction. The free tool lets creators build their own AI image and video workflows, and after its presentation, plenty of attendees were talking about downloading it. For an audience of working professionals, that’s a telling signal: open AI tools are moving from curiosity to the toolkit.

NVIDIA’s presentation brought in the night’s other big theme: local AI. Instead of sending footage and prompts to the cloud, creators can now run AI models on their own machines. For studios, that means client work stays private, costs stay predictable and nothing waits on an upload. It also explains why a hardware brand was hosting an AI evening.

On the floor

Demo stations flanked the main stage, and that’s where the evening’s real conversations happened. Before the talks and in every break, attendees crowded around the ProArt setups, tried the gear and quizzed the ASUS team. Interest in the demos ran high all night.

A bar and a buffet of crowd-pleasers kept the room fed. The audience stayed engaged from the opening tour to the final remarks.

The night wrapped with a raffle of more than $4,000 in ASUS equipment, sending a few lucky attendees home with the tech they’d been testing all night.

Why it matters for New York

New York’s production industry is quietly becoming one of its most interesting tech stories. Stages like Studio C, and the AI tools now running on the machines beside them, put the city at the point where creative work and computing meet. Nights like this show who is building that future here, and who is buying in.