Sony CEO says AI will reshape PlayStation games, tools, and stores

Sony is betting that AI will do more than shave time off a few art tasks. The company now says the same tools that can turn facial animation work from hours into a fraction of a second could spread across PlayStation’s games, development pipelines and store systems.

At Sony’s corporate strategy and earnings presentation in Tokyo, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino laid out a future where AI is built into how PlayStation games are made and how the platform works for players and creators. Sony said developers are already using AI for software engineering productivity, quality assurance, 3D modeling and animation, with Naughty Dog, San Diego Studio and other teams among those adopting the tools.

One of the clearest examples is Mockingbird, an internal system Sony says can rapidly animate 3D facial models from performance capture data. Nishino said it can cut work that would otherwise take hours down to a fraction of a second. Sony also pointed to an AI hair workflow that can turn video of real hairstyles into strand-level 3D models, another sign that the company is targeting tedious production work first.

For players, the bigger promise is not just cheaper production. Nishino suggested AI could help make game worlds feel more alive, citing Gran Turismo Sophy as an example of AI-enabled gameplay and pointing to personality-driven NPC experiments. He also implied AI could help make PlayStation Store experiences more curated, route payments more efficiently and even improve visual fidelity. That is the part that matters most to players: not the buzzwords, but whether AI makes games richer, faster to ship and easier to find.

The tradeoff is obvious. The more AI reaches into voice performance, animation, discovery and store infrastructure, the more Sony has to prove it can protect quality, privacy and human jobs instead of simply automating them away. Sony Group CEO Hiroki Totoki tried to draw that line clearly, saying, “Human creativity must remain at the center.” Sony has also stressed that AI is meant to be an “amplifier,” not a replacement for artists or creators.

That message is backed by a long paper trail inside the company. Sony says it established AI Ethics Guidelines in 2018, an AI Ethics Committee in 2019, an AI Governance Office in 2021, internal generative-AI rules for major Sony companies in 2023 and 2024, and a Sony Global AI Governance Policy in 2025. Sony Pictures has also invested more than $50 million in AI capabilities.

The shift marks a sharper version of what Hermen Hulst said in December 2024, when he argued AI could “revolutionise” gaming but still needed the “human touch.” Nishino’s pitch suggests PlayStation is moving from that balance-of-forces argument to something more operational, where AI is no longer a side experiment but a core part of how Sony wants to build, sell and run the platform.