AI can hit the accelerator. But when it comes to dreaming up the story, the human still has the wheel.
Walk into Whistling Woods International and you will likely find Chaitanya Chinchlikar somewhere near the bleeding edge, tinkering with a virtual production wall or an AI pipeline before most of the industry has finished reading the manual. The man wears a small library of hats. He is vice-president and business head, chief technology officer and head of emerging media at the institute, and chief executive of India’s National Centre of Excellence for animation, visual effects, gaming, comics and extended reality. A chartered accountant by training who ended up chasing pixels for a living, he picked up the SMPTE Excellence in Education Medal in 2024 and was invited into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2025.
So when he talks about AI barrelling into the AVGC trade, he is not shouting from the cheap seats. He has built the labs and written the curricula. And his verdict is refreshingly calm. The machine is a turbocharger, not a wrecking ball. The tools may be racing ahead. But Chinchlikar’s line never wobbles. The kit can change, the workflows can shift, AI can floor the accelerator. The idea still has to come first, is his belief.
In a chat with AnimationXpress,Chinchlikar unpacked how AI was reshaping creative roles, why education needs to keep pace and what India needs to do to move from being a production powerhouse to a creator of global IP. Excerpts from the conversation:
• In two decades of watching the tools change.
“After two decades in media and entertainment education, I’ve seen technology change the tools we use many times. But I don’t see that as a threat to the AVGC industry. I see it as an evolution. The industry will move away from asking, ‘Who can operate this software?’ to asking, ‘Who has the best idea and knows how to bring it to life?’ AI will make production faster and, in many cases, more accessible. But speed is not the same as creativity. If everyone has access to the same AI tools, the real differentiator will be taste, storytelling, imagination and the ability to make original creative choices. For education, that means we have to stop preparing students for specific tools and start preparing them to adapt to tools. The future AVGC professional won’t be purely an artist or a technologist,” he mentioned, “they’ll need to be comfortable being both.”
• On which creative jobs GenAI will reshape.
“GenAI was already speeding up a lot of processes, from ideation and pre-visualisation to design, compositing and post-production. Roles would evolve, particularly those that involved repetitive execution. But we would still need strong artists, storytellers and directors,” he commented “The nature of the job would change more than the need for the job.”
• On teaching AI without switching off the brain.
“AI should have been taught as a tool, not as a substitute for thinking. Students first needed to understand storytelling, creativity, critical thinking and visual language. Once those fundamentals were strong, AI could help them experiment faster, iterate more and push their ideas further. However, given the robustness of AI as a tool, it enabled students to really approach AI with the goal of ‘imagination expansion’ rather than ‘how could I do this quicker and cheaper’,” chinchlikar stated, “We wanted students to look at AI as a springboard which would catapult their imagination to a whole new level.”
• On what events such as the Design Conclave are good for.
“Events such as the Design Conclave created a bridge between the classroom and the real world. Students got to showcase their work, interact with and get guidance from professionals, and actually experiment through workshops,” he replied, “That kind of exposure was extremely important because you learned a lot by seeing how the industry thought and worked.”
• On what India must fix to lead the world.
“India had the talent and scale. What we needed was stronger industry-academia collaboration, more focus on original IP, better infrastructure and continuous upskilling. We shouldn’t just have been the back-end production destination for the world; we should also have been creating our own stories, technologies and global entertainment brands.” chinchlikar shared.
• On his advice to young creators
“AVGC education had to become more fluid. Technology would keep changing, so students needed to become lifelong learners. My advice to young professionals was simple: build strong fundamentals through the right education, stay curious, experiment with new technology, don’t be afraid to try and be resilient,” he answered, “Your portfolio and your ability to solve creative problems would ultimately speak louder than any qualification.”
And perhaps that is the bigger plot twist in the AI story. The machines may get faster, the pipelines may get slicker and the prompts may get cleverer. But the pixels settle, somebody still has to have something worth saying.
