News executives weigh in on the change management of AI
Generative AI Initiative Blog | 15 September 2024
I just got back from the INMA Roundtable at Vail, where I had the privilege of spending three days in discussions with 50 leaders of member companies.
As they prepare for 2025, they gathered to discuss future-proofing their businesses.
We asked the leaders at Vail to outline what they were concerned about going into the session. They said:
Structural and organisational change needed to benefit from AI.
Product and audience development in the AI transformation.
AI for efficiencies.
How to prioritise AI initiatives.
Grabbing the AI opportunity.
We also asked them after the conference what they were going to do upon returning to work, and they said:
Prioritise AI plans.
Put AI in the heart of the transformation.
Use AI to do newsroom activities that free up journalists’ time.
Take a more structured approach towards AI.
Hyperlocal and personalisation AI are feasible today.
Rethink our AI structure, resource alignment.
AI: Start with efficiencies and move towards growth as it becomes more comfortable.
AI: Raise awareness, expand basic uses across team, leverage champions.
Consumers will accept AI content.
Integration of AI into different projects.
Integration of AI into CMS.
Take the LLMs’ money/make deals with LLMs if you can.
Some other key points that emerged from our discussions:
Don’t be hung up on ROI — it stifles innovation. Some CEOs pointed towards the tension between the CFO and the team running experiments. Others pointed out that seeking returns too early can kill any spirit of innovation, especially when dealing with a technology as new as generative AI, where trial and error has to be factored in.
Everyone is building GenAI tools, but not everyone in the news organisation is excited about using these tools. A few participants at Vail mentioned a 25% to 30% adoption rate.
A show of hands suggested about half of the people in the room said they were tracking the adoption of AI tools. About half are creating tools for their journalists and are not even measuring whether they are using them or not.
Change management takes some effort. An estimate by McKinsey & Company shows companies need to spend US$3 on change management for every dollar spent on a GenAI application.
On the latter point, there was a robust discussion about whether this number could possibly be accurate. Surely it was too high?
Here is what McKinsey says about that: “Our experience has shown that a good rule of thumb for managing GenAI costs is that for every US$1 spent on developing a model, you need to spend about US$3 for change management. (By way of comparison, for digital solutions, the ratio has tended to be closer to US$1 for development to US$1 for change management.)”
What does change management look like? It entails several efforts, such as:
Training programmes for staff to use new AI tools.
Restructuring of workflows to incorporate AI-assisted processes.
Development of new policies and guidelines for AI use.
Addressing ethical concerns and ensuring responsible AI use.
Adapting business strategies to leverage AI capabilities.
Here are some examples of the resources media companies are putting into GenAI change management:
Schibsted’s Aftonbladet has trained 260 journalists in prompt engineering and has seven full-time positions on its AI hub.
Tamedia has onboarded 1,300 employees by going on a roadshow to specific teams and training them, while also writing a newsletter and setting up a prompt library.
Mediahuis has set up an AI task force within each of its newsrooms and has a central coordinator who trains and supports the adoption of AI tools with each newsroom lead. It has 4,500 employees at more than 30 news brands.
Still not convinced? Disregard cautionary tales at your own peril of companies not thinking through GenAI implementation, such as this one about employees accessing sensitive salary information through Copilot summaries.
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