First Sight Media and MyGraduationClip won Best Collaboration Between Agency/Organiser & AI Supplier for a partnership that turns a full-length ceremony into a personalised, shareable clip for every graduate, in minutes.
Graduation is one of the most emotional and shareable moments in a person’s life, but for years the technology around it worked against that.
Graduates had to scrub through a full-length ceremony recording to relive the moment that they crossed the graduation stage – or wait days, sometimes weeks, for a manually edited clip. By the time the clip arrived, the ideal moment to share had passed, taking with it the reach, engagement and sense of community that moment could have created.
First Sight Media and MyGraduationClip set out to close that gap – and won the AI Edition’s Collaboration category for doing it.
The point the judges kept making is that this is a win for the partnership, not just the AI. MyGraduationClip provides the intelligence; First Sight Media provides the production quality, speed and workflow discipline that lets the intelligence run in near real time. Neither could deliver the result alone.
The AI
MyGraduationClip’s multimodal platform turns raw ceremony footage into an individual clip for each graduate. It combines automatic speech recognition to spot name-announcement moments, computer vision to track each graduate crossing the stage, temporal pattern matching to line the two up, and confidence-based validation to keep quality high. Where the system is less certain, graduates simply confirm themselves from a short set of thumbnails, human-in-the-loop accuracy without slowing delivery. What used to be a manual job of days or weeks becomes an automated one measured in minutes.
The production discipline
That speed only exists because of how First Sight Media runs the room. As the UK’s leading provider of graduation video production, streaming and AV, working with 60+ institutions and delivering more than 3,000 ceremonies a year, it has built a multi-camera capture-and-transfer workflow that feeds footage straight into MyGraduationClip’s AI the moment the last graduate has crossed the stage. The clip is generated within minutes, often before the graduate has even left the venue, and the system holds up at real scale, with as many as 700 clips produced from a single ceremony.
The result
The impact is measurable and striking. Delivering clips in real time, rather than the following day, drives up to a 400% increase in engagement, because graduates share their moment at peak emotion. Alumni sign-up rates have risen from an average of 6% to 78% through the integrated digital experience. And it works at scale: personalised clips delivered within minutes, supporting around 150,000 graduates, with the model now expanding internationally, including new partnerships in Australia.
The judges were unusually aligned. Shervin Mashayekh called it “a very strong collaboration entry because the value clearly comes from the partnership, not only from the AI platform itself.” Anca Platon Trifan praised a collaboration logic that was “clear and credible: production workflow plus AI clip generation create a result neither side could deliver alone.” Taline Jones singled out the timing: footage moving “straight from capture into AI processing, so clips are generated within minutes and often before a graduation ceremony finishes.”
“A very strong collaboration entry, because the value clearly comes from the partnership, not only from the AI platform itself.”
— Shervin Mashayekh, Judge, Event Technology Awards AI Edition 2026
In the partners’ words
“Winning at the inaugural Event Technology Awards: AI Edition is fantastic recognition, but what makes this achievement particularly meaningful is the impact our partnership is having across universities. Graduation is one of the most significant milestones in a student’s journey and a pivotal moment in building lasting alumni relationships. By combining technology with a seamless, personalised experience, we’re helping universities strengthen engagement at exactly the right moment, at a scale that simply wasn’t possible before.”
— Rich Belcher, Managing Director, First Sight Media
“This award demonstrates the value of bringing together great technology with real-world event delivery. Working alongside the First Sight Media team, we’ve seen how AI can create meaningful moments for thousands of graduates while giving universities a scalable, engaging solution. We’re incredibly proud to see our meaningful collaboration recognised by the industry.”
— Matt Hoare, Founder and Managing Director, MyGraduationClip
Why it matters for the industry
This win is a useful corrective. As AI floods into events, it is tempting to treat the model as the whole story. First Sight Media and MyGraduationClip show that the most impressive AI outcomes still depend on operational excellence, on the people and production discipline that get clean footage into the system fast enough for the intelligence to matter. The lesson for the industry is that the best results come from AI suppliers and production partners working as one flow, not from either side alone.
About the partners
First Sight Media is the UK’s leading provider of graduation video production, streaming and AV, working with 60+ institutions and delivering 3,000+ ceremonies a year. MyGraduationClip is the pioneer of instant, personalised graduation video delivery, using multimodal AI to give every graduate their on-stage moment within minutes. Together they have redefined graduation as a real-time, socially amplified, community-driven experience.
