How AI can be used to shape content strategy

Q: How?

A: AI shapes content strategy the same way as an earthquake shapes a city. You can bolt bookcases to the wall and apply safety film to the windows — that’s useful work. But when the ground itself begins to move, the real question is whether the foundations are strong enough.

As a tool, AI is certainly helpful. It can identify new audience niches, increase production, and enable new user-friendly features. It can support investigative work by sifting vast datasets quickly, and it can automate drudgery — who really wants to spend the day transcribing interviews? AI frees time and resources for editorial and product teams.

But these efficiencies are only the warm-up act. AI is a disruptive force for publishing. It is not simply a better hammer; it’s a tectonic shift. It unleashes torrents of cheap, mass-produced, real-time, personalised, multilingual content. It is already rewriting the economics of publishing, and we have likely not yet seen the applications that will prove most destabilising. It all looks inevitable in retrospect, but Netflix only launched streaming in 2007, twelve years after AOL first sold internet access. Spotify came a year later. OpenAI may seem insurmountable today, but it could yet prove to be this age’s Netscape.

In this new environment, efficiency matters, but efficiency alone is not a strategy. Content strategy must confront a competitive environment where the marginal cost of production is close to zero.

Publishers still hold advantages: established relationships with audiences, content designed to meet their needs, and human talent that commands trust. But these advantages must be deployed quickly. As content becomes commodity, publishers must add value in ways that cannot be easily replicated at scale — and anchor their strategies on those distinctions.

There are some areas that stand out as “AI-resilient”:

• Exclusive, proprietary information. Original reporting, surveys, interviews and expert analysis have always separated serious journalism from “churnalism”. With AI able to generate commodity copy at scale, that distinction becomes starker.
• Personality-based content. The humour, charisma and authority of a recognisable individual cannot easily be cloned. Audiences can form strong relationships with people — and social platforms and podcasts make these relationships even closer, especially for younger audiences.
• Niche products. Services tailored for micro-segments, designed around specific needs or interests, can command loyalty even if parts of the content are AI-assisted. Publishers’ deep knowledge of their audiences gives them an advantage here.
• Community. Forums, events and comments sections can build a sense of belonging and a reluctance to churn that pure content rarely achieves. If well managed — and AI can help with moderation — communities reinforce subscription value and create opportunities for premium packages and new business models.

These are the foundations of resilience. AI can increase efficiency — but without distinctive strategies, publishers risk being overwhelmed by AI-driven competition.

Publishers need to re-examine their strategies. AI should be used wherever it frees journalists to do what only humans can do: provide judgement, context, editorial oversight and trust. We recommend three steps, as outlined below.

Q: What are your three top tips?

1. Figure out where you stand: Know your audience and your output. Re-tag content to identify audience clusters and the sub-topics that perform best with them. Map revenues by content type, to understand how much each is worth in advertising, sponsorship, subscriptions or retention. AI can help: commercial LLMs can classify articles by various content dimensions such as subject, geography, or bias at scale, giving a clearer view of what drives success.
2. Quantify your vulnerability: Once you know what drives revenue, estimate how much of it is exposed to commoditisation. Routine reporting, social media wrap-ups, generic explainers or listicles may be at risk sooner than investigative work or commentary. The criteria to define substitution risk should include technical replicability, differentiation, exclusivity, community effect and brand strength. For B2B products, add factors such as customer sophistication, contractual stickiness and functional value of brand (eg. the need of a recognised third-party brand source for filings).
3. Plan your response: The time of scattershot product launches is over. With the window closing fast, publishers must set their vision for the future, communicate it clearly and focus investment. Prioritise the product roadmap around long term resilience and returns, not short-term experiments.

FT Strategies is the specialist media consultancy owned by the Financial Times. We help news and media organisations worldwide tackle strategic challenges, drive sustainable growth and innovate with AI, technology and data. Combining technical and management consulting with operational expertise, we deliver end-to-end support, from strategy to execution, empowering clients to build resilient, customer-centric businesses.

Email: adriana.whiteley@ft.com

Web: www.ftstrategies.com