Mark Goffman

Every creative industry is racing to figure out where AI fits. Goffman has been early to the tools that reshaped his industry over the last 20 years, from pioneering streaming original content at Paramount Digital to bringing VR into a network TV series, and now sits at the forefront of AI and filmmaking. His argument is simple: the first mile and the last mile of creative work, originating the idea and exercising the judgment that finishes it, stay human, while AI can do real work in the middle. He shows what the tools are genuinely good for, what they quietly erode, and how to put them to work without losing the thing that makes the work matter. Audiences leave able to tell signal from noise and to decide what to hand to AI and what to keep firmly in human hands.

A 20-plus-year veteran writer and producer, Goffman has created and sold projects to legacy networks, streamers, and international distributors, and has watched the business remake itself more than once. This talk walks through the economics and creative forces reshaping television now: the streaming shakeout, the contraction in what gets made, the shifting math of how shows get financed, and what it all means for the kind of stories that reach a screen. Audiences in and around the industry leave with a clearer map of where the business is going and what it means for their own bets, locally, nationally, and globally.

A network drama is a high-stakes creative enterprise run on impossible deadlines by a room full of talented, opinionated people. Goffman has led those rooms on some of television's most demanding series, and the tools that make a writers' room work transfer directly to any team that has to be creative on a clock. Audiences leave knowing how to build candor without ego, draw the best ideas out of a group, protect people's willingness to take creative risks, and decide well under pressure, including how AI tools fit into a creative process without flattening it.

Every leader and every company is sitting on a true story worth telling, and the ones who tell it well are the ones people remember. Finding that story is its own craft, and it is the one Goffman has spent his career mastering: walking into a real, messy life or event and finding the one version a mass audience cannot look away from. He saw a hit series in a behavioral economist (NBC's "The Irrational," inspired by Dan Ariely's bestseller "Predictably Irrational"), an underdog rebellion in a financial mystery (his bitcoin feature "The Satoshi Claim"), and a thriller in a fugitive executive (a limited series on Carlos Ghosn's escape from Japan). He has also helped major companies tell their own stories, producing launch and brand films for Microsoft and Gibson Guitars. The skill that turns a real person into a character people root for is the same one that turns a company into a story people believe in.

Before Hollywood, Goffman worked in public policy, wrote speeches for elected officials, and advised the State Department and the White House. His work has always returned to the same idea: narrative is how cultures change their minds about science, technology, institutions, and each other. Audiences leave understanding how stories move people, shift public understanding, and open conversations that facts and data alone cannot, and how to put that to work for a cause or an institution they care about.

Mark and his wife, Refundly CEO Lindsay Goffman, started a company together in the middle of the 2023 strikes, he still writing, she still producing. In this two-hander keynote, the husband-and-wife co-founders trade the unfiltered version of what building a business with your spouse actually demands: dividing roles without stepping on each other, fighting fair and still deciding, and protecting a marriage and a startup at the same time. Told from both sides of the table, with a full-circle kicker, since Refundly now helps TV productions manage their orders and returns.