Systematic experimentation with generative AI has the potential to be transformative and move publishers away from the article being the atomic unit of content, according Dylan Jacques, director of technology at Britain’s Telegraph Media Group.

His team has the goal of creating 12 use cases for AI in 12 months. 

“I didn’t for a minute think that we’d have 12 barnstorming, revenue-driving cases,” he said. Instead, the point is to treat each case as a building block for future capabilities and to gather useful data so the Telegraph can figure out what to place “big bets” on. 

“We need to be delivering a major feature every single month in front of customers, and it needs to be a live thing,” Jacques said “The team has very, very clear rules of the road.”

The Telegraph produces machine learning-driven newsletters, which draw from its recommendation engine, with a GenAI summary on top. 

“Instead of having five images and headlines that feel very aggregated, it will have a one-paragraph summary that says, ‘Dylan, you may have seen in the news today that Keir Starmer has announced…’ — so what we end up with is the equivalent of the editor introducing it in a human way.

“They provide quite a significant hook into the content itself. It’s reasonably simple but it’s quite effective. We’ve had a 20% uplift in click throughs from those articles. That was a really important proof point for us, and that paved the way for us to start inserting generated summaries into digital articles at the top.”

The team is now working on extending this concept further. For example, consumers may appreciate a quick audio briefing of the day’s key news stories with the option to click through to any of the articles to dive deeper.  

The Telegraph is also working on two other projects because Jacques believes the news consumer’s experience will be totally different in three or four years.

The first is a working prototype of what the future of news consumption may be.

“What I’d really like to do is have a significantly changed customer experience,” he said. “We’re working with our design team on a prototype that is really advanced and what the future of news consumption is going to be. It’s radically different from the traditional experience of an article and how one might consume five stories on a commute, and it’s all through the lens of GenAI.”

The team plans to run pilots of the five or six components of this new user experience with their audience.

The Telegraph is also building a chat interface based on its extensive travel content, which caters to a different audience from its core politics news audience: “We have amassed a huge catalogue of travel content. It’s a little bit hard to navigate because it’s a cacophony of lots of different things.”

A chat product would ask the consumer what they would like to do and use that as a springboard for providing relevant content. The reader would also be able to ask about specific needs — such as travelling with children or stopping somewhere in particular on the way — and receive an itinerary or a guide for the trip.

“Publishers have not historically been very good at monetising their archive and the reason for that is that the atomic unit has been the article. The leap that we’re now seeing with GenAI is that you can stop thinking about an article because you’re not going to be returning just a list of articles, some of which might not be at all relevant. 

“But there might be a paragraph in one of them which, when combined with a paragraph from another one, becomes better and more than the sum of its parts, richer. And I think travel’s a really good example of that,” Jacques said, citing obscure facts in various articles that could be recombined to create a useful guide for a visitor to a city as either text or audio.

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