Grappling with AI

The user perspective

Let's start with the end-user first. Deloitte have produced some interesting insights into consumer attitudes to AI, with the actual usage being much lower than one might think. In 2024, only 36% of 16+ adults (18m people) had actually tried AI tools. That is strongly up on the previous year's 26%, but is still relatively low, given all the media hype. Of that 36%, only 36% were using it with any regularity: lots of consumers have had a go with AI tools, but have been unimpressed or did not integrate it into their lives.

In addition, there are still serious concerns right across the population about the accuracy and bias of what they see online. And great wariness about chatbots and AI-generated emails in customer service. So, AI is not top of the list of general consumer issues: unless they are just about to be replaced by a robot at work, of course, or they belong to one of the tech-savvy cohorts who are actively embracing this brave new two-way-conversational world.

The publisher perspective

By contrast, we in the media business are much more concerned and involved, for obvious reasons. Generally, publishers are at the cutting edge, often way ahead of most of the consumer cohorts we engage with. Our mediafutures discussion groups highlight that publisher issues basically fall into three boxes: positive opportunities, negative threats and disruptive challenges. Looking at each one in turn...

1. Positive opportunities: These are fairly obvious, but cover a wide range of areas, not just editorial and content creation. Also, some of the applications are the simple automation of repetitive tasks rather than LLM, but they often all get lumped together in the term ‘AI’. These positives include (in no particular order):

• Productivity enhancements across almost every activity, from finance to subs management to automating expense claims.
• Dynamic product enhancements and NPD.
• Audience funnel optimisation.
• Reformatting content to distribute across different platforms and distribution channels
• Internal publisher conversational search tools, which open up a more sophisticated route to leveraging archive material, as well as enabling two-way conversations with our users.
• Licence revenues.
• Translation and tailoring content for local audiences.

2. Negative threats: These too are pretty obvious, but they also represent existential threats to what we do. They include:

• LLM replacing human journalism completely.
• LLM misattribution of content, resulting in reputational damage.
• Reducing the barriers to entry for new players in content creation, whether in news, general lifestyle or specialist media verticals.
• A drop in search referrals.

3. Disruptive challenges: This is where the old ‘newspaper’ versus ‘magazine’ divide opens up. When news brands talk about ‘digital’, they usually mean website-based, article-level news and analysis, where there is massive free competition online. When magazine brands talk about digital, they are coming at it from a history of print-replica digital editions. Both sectors are now converging and overlapping more in their business models and practices than ever before. Yet the old trend to atomise content (moving from issues to articles) is being completely overtaken by increasingly two-way conversations with our audiences. That highlights the fact that very few publishers are as audience-driven as they claim. Essentially, most are still “push” organisations: repackaging content to be distributed across multiple platforms, rather than really interacting dynamically with their audiences and allowing them to be much more in control of what, how, where and when they engage with their content. That is one of the biggest challenges facing our industry.

What to do about all this?

Here are a few suggestions from the mediafutures discussion groups...

• Understand AI usage among our users / consumers. This is a mix of analysing transactional data and deep dives into qualitative research among the various (often very different) cohorts who swim in all our audience pools.
• Keep up to date with tech developments and tools. Different organisations are tackling this in different ways, but mainly deciding whether this is a full-time job role(s) or a part of everybody’s job description. Often, it is a bit of both with full-time focus for a short time (‘Head of AI’ is one intriguing job title!), before distributing the responsibility around the organisation.
• Share the learnings internally. A number of media companies have developed staff forums to share learnings across the organisation. This should lead on into live tests of new applications. It will engage staff at every level. It will also raise some tricky decisions about company structure, skills, working patterns (Working-from-Home is still a live and contentious issue for some), pay levels, staff churn (managing it or deliberately driving it), etc etc.
• Create a company-wide framework for everything in terms of AI ethics and processes. This also extends to our business partners, where transparency and collaboration are critical.
• Be realistic and prioritise ruthlessly. Start small, move quickly and do not over-engineer. And quickly identify which activities are likely to generate serious money.
• Maintain quality, consistency and brand values through everything.
• Invest in the tech stacks to make it all happen. This usually has the longest lead times and where massive and costly mistakes can be made.
• And by the way, preparing and defending against cyberattack is another tech issue on the list!

Phew! Having gone through all that, talking about Trump might have been easier, after all... but on second thoughts, perhaps not!

mediafutures is an ongoing benchmarking survey of the industry undertaken by Wessenden Marketing in partnership with InPublishing. Now in its 17th year, it maps the key drivers, metrics and issues that are transforming the shape and direction of the whole media business. mediafuturesPULSE is a new, more regular tracking survey of key industry performance metrics.

This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.