Proof of how Gen-AI is transforming the news ecosystem is evident in the many case studies featured at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Krakow. Like: how it’s engineering a shift in Audience behaviour, says Nikita Roy, Harvard-recognised AI futurist and founder of Newsroom Robots Lab, who delivered a presentation that revealed both thrilling and alarming developments.
She illustrated this with a simple ‘before and after’ graphic that clarifies how AI is transforming Search, from SEO – search engine optimisation, that focuses on ranking in search engine results – to AEO: answer engine optimisation, which answers the user directly.
“The newsroom shift to an audience-first approach is particularly evident in the Chatbot boom,” explained Roy, who had analysed how newsrooms are using chatbots to engage audiences, across the world, over the past year.
“I started seeing patterns of jobs that each of those chatbots are starting to do,” she added, emphasising the customisation of tools that pushes personalisation to a higher level, by providing contextual info for specific user needs.
How newsrooms are using Chatbots to help audiences:
UNDERSTAND News easily: Launched just this week, Sweden’s Aftonbladet helps people find answers from its news archives in 50 languages. “What makes it interesting is that we can now talk to it, in two languages,” explains Roy.
EMPOWER Spotlight PA’s Election Assistant enables your audience to make informed decisions.
NAVIGATE events: The Hindu, India launched Margazhi in December, to helps users find content schedules across multiple different venues and events.
DISCOVER: San Francisco Chronicle’s Chowbot is built upon food and wine coverage.
On the surface, these are basically content recommendations. “But instead of being able to scroll to something, now you’re able to get contextual information for your specific need,” explained Roy.
Waves of Change: From text to voice
This is just the first interface emerging with Gen-AI: “The next big shift that I’m seeing coming is voice-first, conversational,” added Roy. “This is not just chatbots: Your audience is talking.”
Gen Z and Gen Alpha are steering this growth, with their embrace of AI.
“An eMarketer study found that 64% of the US Gen Z population will be using a voice system monthly by 2027 – up from 51% in 2020,” noted Roy
‘Already, Gen Alpha is interacting with Amazon Alexa, who answers 25 million questions from children every month – and Character AI, which has a predominantly Gen Z audience, deals with 20,000 queries per second – a fifth of Google’s volume.’
“This audience behaviour from Gen Z and Gen Alpha is showing that no longer is information a broadcast – it’s now a dialogue; a conversation that is showing intent and ability to find the information that meets the intent and need at that moment,” Roy advised.
Capitalising on a trend
It’s also setting a trend, with venture capital funds pouring money into voice agents: “In December ChatGPT was one of the first AI tools to go multimodal; in the US, Google is converting that ‘Discover’ seat into a five-minute podcast. And Microsoft Copilot took this one step further just last month (April) by including an interactive podcast that can be created on any topic, based on the content and information provided.”
Roy, too, can take this one step further: “I can have a conversation with my podcast hosts about the topic, maybe create an AI and journalism podcast that I want to know, and it takes all of the information from the Newsroom Robots Lab podcast that I host and the content that we put out. So the podcast episodes, trainings that I do, talk to you – it’s both the chat, and a voice-first experience.”
This, reckons Roy, “is the brand coming alive; newsroom robots coming alive to help guide audiences to find that information for them.”
Now for the synthetic audience
Prepare for the end of the article, warned Roy. “The next big paradigm shift we’re seeing are AI agents becoming your audience, and when the computer decides to take actions on your behalf.”
There’s Research GPT which, thanks to AI newsroom partnerships and licensing deals, enables AI to pull content across news websites into a speech which gives you the information however you want, instead of pulling it across every single language that operated on the Google search, she explained.
Things get really interesting with Chat GPT’s Operator, which is Agentic AI that acts like a human to follow prompts; Confluence, for example, reads news, and instructs agents to access news sites – even behind paywalls!
“This is no longer about scraping websites; we are entering another conversation that we ought to be having,” advised Roy, illustrating how Agentic AI can instruct the model on how to bypass the table picking article.
“It’s taking human life actions and identifying this in almost every single newsroom; I haven’t yet found a newsroom where I haven’t been able to bypass the table through this.”
All of this is pointing to the death of the article as we know it, adds Roy: ”Because when an AI model,or agent looks at an article, it’s not seeing content; it’s seeing data points and, in trying to make sense of a bunch of different data points, it’s remixing everything and creating a completely new set of information.”
What next for an industry that has been slow to understand and respond to the many different transformations required by this digital era – and in danger of losing our future audiences?
Roy set this challenge: “I hope that we can begin to really tap in across our organisations – not just to the journalists, but to our product teams, audiences, data teams – look into your own newsrooms, build things that you can measure, build things that help you, and build your generational audiences.”
Further Reading
