Short-video creation: fix workflows with skills, not just prompts

Executive Summary

Brands, agencies and independent creators who must produce dozens to hundreds of native vertical clips per month face fragmented, error-prone workflows: teams stitch together multiple apps, re-run brittle prompt-engineering for each asset, and spend disproportionate time on manual editing and formatting rather than storytelling. That inefficiency exists against a sizable market—approximately $48B in global short-video ad spend (approx. 2026 estimate) plus a $30B creator tools and video production services market, for a $78.0B total opportunity. The product would be a workflow-first platform that exposes composable, versioned “skills” (script-to-shotlist, storyboard-to-edit, voiceover tuning, captioning, platform-specific formatter, A/B variant generator) and an orchestration layer that assembles those skills into repeatable pipelines with human-in-the-loop checkpoints and integrations into editors and publishing APIs. By treating skills as testable primitives rather than opaque prompts, teams can scale consistent outputs, measure performance by variant, and reduce rework across campaigns. Timing is attractive because multimodal AI and LLM orchestration have recently reached the fidelity and latency thresholds needed to automate end-to-end sequencing, while TikTok, Reels and Shorts continue to prioritize short-form native formats—driving demand for higher throughput. Differentiation will require investment: the strength is workflow composability, provenance and enterprise controls (market score 92/100, revenue potential 84/100), but challenges include imperfect generative-video quality, model hallucination, rights and brand-safety management, and a nontrivial enterprise sales and integration effort.