AI is opening up new possibilities for game development, but the biggest opportunity may not be making existing games with smarter characters. It may be creating entirely new kinds of games, experiences that would not be possible without artificial intelligence.

That was the central theme of a panel at GamesBeat Next 2026 in San Francisco, where Brian Tanner, the chief executive officer of Artificial Agency; Piero Molino, the chief executive officer of Studio Atelico; and Jon Snoddy, the chief executive officer of Operative Games, discussed what it means to build games around AI from the ground up. The conversation was moderated by Jamil Moledina, a partner at Principal Venture Partners.

For Tanner, the appeal of AI in games is closely tied to the broader development of agentic AI. Having worked at Google DeepMind, he saw games as a way to make the capabilities of AI agents tangible and accessible to a wider audience.

“I wanted to remind people why agents are actually really cool,” Tanner said. “Finding a way for people to play with them and to have experiences that they haven’t had before would be the way to do it.”

The challenge, however, is making those experiences feel like games rather than demonstrations of technology.

Molino pointed to the generative agent experiments that emerged from Stanford as an early source of inspiration for the possibilities of AI-driven worlds. But he also highlighted a distinction between creating an open-ended simulation and designing something that people actually want to play.

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