Continuing my discussion about personalisation and GenAI, today, let's look at two worthwhile use cases: the Harvard Business Review and Clarín.

Harvard Business Review’s hyper-personalisation strategy

Harvard Business Review is thinking about “hyper-personalisation” — about the extent to which an editor curates an issue of a magazine versus the reader creating their own issue based on themes that are relevant to them. 

“We see hyper-personalisation driven by AI as a game changer. It will allow us — alongside editorial curation — to deliver highly relevant and individually tailored content and experiences at scale, whether it’s bespoke content recommendations or personalised learning pathways for our subscribers,” Sarah McConville, co-president of Harvard Business Publishing, told INMA.

The publication is also working on a bot that helps readers get feedback on difficult conversations and how to prepare for career transitions. 

“Readers turn to HBR for proven ideas to help them run their companies and their careers more effectively. By providing helpful, on-demand answers to leadership questions, HBR’s bot goes beyond search to offer a new way for subscribers to interact with, learn from, and tap into HBR’s rich well of content going back decades — including its flagship magazine, content on HBR.org, video, and podcasts,” McConville said.

The Harvard Business Review already has an app that offers some personalisation, which the user can direct, and a tip of the day that provides a summarised version of management advice.

Clarín’s UalterAI reading assistant

When it comes to consuming content in a form that is personalised to the user’s needs, the reader is spoilt for choice at Clarín. If you haven’t yet checked out Clarin.com’s reading assistant, UalterAI, take a look now. It appears in all articles as a widget that the reader can click on. Then, a summary appears, covering 10% to 20% of the original text’s length.  

It also presents five types of analysis modules:

• The first is bullet points — a list of up to 10 concise sentences that delve into the summary information.

• A second analysis module extracts quotes and presents them alongside the names of the individuals who made those statements. All data, numbers, and figures in the text are extracted, classified, and presented in two-column tables for ease of comprehension. 

• Information can also be read as a FAQ, a questionnaire of up to 10 questions and answers that condense and simplify the news, or a glossary module that extracts and classifies the keywords of the text, accompanied by a brief definition.

Most news publishers, on average, produce content that would take the average reader about 15 hours to read, while most readers do not spend more than 20 minutes a day reading the news, Clarín points out. “The content is overwhelming, and readers miss a significant amount of relevant information.”

Two more worth noting

Does summarisation cannibalise normal readership? Norway’s Verdens Gang said last year it actually increases reader engagement, and now, the Norwegian public broadcaster found the same outcome. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung found visits per visitor were almost twice as high for those subscribers who read summaries, and 81% of its users deemed the summarisation feature useful.

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