Chat products are definitely the flavour of the week. Pretty much every media organisation we know has either built one or is thinking of building one.

Why all this excitement about conversational interfaces? What have we learned from building them over the past year and a half? Here are some key insights from different publications in the news business.

• The real utility of a chatbot is in the first-party data you can gather and then use to segment users — and then target them with advertising and offers accordingly, as Jonathan Roberts, chief innovation officer of Dotdash Meredith, points out. Offer the reader prompts that help with segmentation to understand user intent. 

• Use a chatbot as a way of showing value to subscribers. They now have information that is relevant to them at their fingertips instead of having to wade through tens of thousands of articles using poor site search and navigation. As Daniela Buoli, head of product development at Italy’s RCS Media, said when talking about Corriere della Sera’s AI Reader’s Assistant: “People pay for concrete value to solve a real problem.”

• A chatbot can be useful at the top of the funnel as well. You can use it to enrich your content portfolio. Pick a sustainable topic on which you can consistently deliver content on a high frequency, and then produce new content with minimal additional cost, as Ringier Slovakia Communities points out. They found 70% of the readers of their Weather Assistant are new users, and the articles generate 100,000 page views a month. Also interesting: Google did not seem to mind the AI authorship, and Google Discover turned out to be a surprisingly strong source of referral traffic.

• Use it to make complex information more accessible to new audiences, such as younger readers who may not have all the context of an ongoing, long-running story but want to know more without feeling stupid. For example, Norway’s TV 2 ASA created “KI-Kjetil,” a digital avatar of a TV 2 journalist, which users could chat with to learn more about the U.S. presidential election. It was live for 106 hours, in which it answered approximately 70,000 questions from over 42,000 unique users. 

• Use it to reduce the burden on human teams. India’s Amar Ujala created a chatbot to answer audience questions about the Mahakumbh, a Hindu pilgrimage that attracted over 660 million people this year. It handled more than 25,000 queries, reducing dependence on physical help desks, and received an 85% satisfaction rating from users, who cited its quick and helpful responses. Users were guided based on their location and behavioral AI insights. The bot could respond in both English and Hindi.

• Where you place the bot matters. Sweden’s Aftonbladet discovered its audience liked using its Hej chatbot when they placed it at the bottom of article pages. The Texas Tribune saw very little activity on its chatbot when users were asked to go to a dedicated page for it. But after they embedded it on an article page about the chatbot, it gained engagement. One strategy that works: featuring the chatbot prominently in articles optimised for SEO.

• Provide strong prompts/pre-written questions that reflect what your readers genuinely care about. Aftonbladet found this was the quickest way to get some traction, pointing out “the closer it is to the news stream, the better.”

• Scope it narrowly so your site does not get hammered with queries and to make experimentation quicker and easier. For example, The Washington Post created a bot to answer questions on climate change. The San Francisco Chronicle created a chat interface for answering questions on Kamala Harris.

• Consider using evergreen content that will not be overtaken by events, because ensuring a reader gets the most recent news on a topic can sometimes be challenging. For example, Germany’s Funke Mediengruppe created a bot to come up with recipes. Within the first 10 days,  the chatbot recorded almost 4,300 sessions and 600 recipe clicks with a click-through rate of 13%.  

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