Eddie AI’s Shamir Allibhai on Building an AI Teammate for Editors

by Alexandra ThompsonJune 7^th, 2026

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Some of you may know Eddie AI as an AI assistant for video editors, built to help with logging, organization, and assembly work. At Cine Gear 2026, Johnnie sat down with Eddie AI co-founder Shamir Allibhai to talk about the path behind the product, the role of AI in post production, and why Eddie is being built as a teammate rather than another editing platform.

Since we have already covered Eddie AI’s recent updates, including A and B Roll Logging v2, topic steering, and the 20 hour Pro Plus tier, as well as Night Shift in our NAB 2026 hands-on demo, this conversation looked more at the thinking behind the company.

From editing to AI tools

Shamir’s route into video started early, cutting family vacation footage on VCRs before moving into linear editing, the BBC, and documentary work. Later, while working across post-production and film-related projects, he kept returning to the same problem: finding the right material inside hours of footage, especially when teams were separated across locations.

That led to Simon Says, a timecode-based speech recognition platform for post-production workflows. His work there later brought him to Facebook, where he joined the video AI team and worked on tools and infrastructure for large-scale video processing. In 2023, inspired by the new wave of AI tools, he left to build Eddie AI.

AI, anxiety, and the editor’s role

Johnnie also raised the concern many filmmakers and editors have around AI. Shamir’s answer was direct: AI is here, it is improving, and it is not going back in the box. At the same time, he acknowledged that much of the anxiety comes from real concerns around work, income, and creative control.

He also pointed out that “AI” is a broad term. When Simon Says started, speech recognition was already considered AI. Today, the concern is more focused on generative AI and what it may change. Shamir’s view is that each major technical shift, from linear editing to NLEs, from film to digital, and from dedicated cameras to phones, has allowed more people to tell stories. Eddie AI is built around that same idea: helping people create more and better work by reducing the tedious parts of the process.

Not another NLE

Eddie is not trying to replace Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut Pro. Shamir described those NLEs as partners, with Eddie creating project sequences that relink to the original source media. Editors still finish the work in the tools they already know.

The goal is to give editors a proactive assistant that can understand a project, organize footage, surface summaries and topics, and help move an edit forward. Some users want a co-pilot they can question and iterate with. Others simply want to drop footage in and receive organized logs, B-roll, soundbites, or social clips.

That second use case is where Night Shift comes in. The agentic mode is designed to work without a long back-and-forth: users drop in footage, and Eddie separates A roll and B roll, syncs multicam material, logs the footage, and builds an assembly edit for Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut Pro.

Asked whether companies like Adobe or Blackmagic Design could make Eddie obsolete, Shamir said his focus is not on larger competitors but on customer problems. The company’s aim is to solve the parts of post-production where editors lose time before they get to the creative decisions.

Price and availability

Eddie AI is free to download, with free credits available to try the system, and a pay-as-you-go option for users who only need it occasionally. Pay-as-you-go credits are listed at $15 per credit. The current pricing page lists Pro and Pro+ subscription tiers, with Pro+ supporting larger project sizes, including up to 20 hours of source material for Docs/Stringouts workflows. For more information, visit the Eddie AI website.

Does Eddie AI’s teammate approach make sense for your editing workflow? Or would you rather keep AI tools limited to logging, transcription, and organization? Let us know in the comments.