As artificial intelligence becomes a foundational layer in media workflows — powering everything from vision-based tagging to live personalization and generative overlays — the infrastructure between signal and inference has come under new scrutiny. Traditional video codecs, designed for human viewing and distribution, often lack the efficiency, flexibility, and semantic awareness required to support real-time AI-driven workflows at scale. This paper introduces VC-6, a region-aware, hierarchical codec designed to accelerate AI pipelines by enabling selective decoding, multiresolution access, and GPU-optimized performance. By shifting preprocessing intelligence into the codec layer, VC-6 offers a strategic opportunity to reduce cost, improve inference speed, and unlock new creative workflows.