Recent research shows half of all ChatGPT usage comes from people seeking information or practical guidance — and news is a fast-growing use case.

“Search is one of the most popular tools within ChatGPT today,” Christina Lim, partner manager of media partnerships at OpenAI, told INMA members at a recent Webinar.

ChatGPT receives more than 1 billion search queries a week, she said: “What we are seeing is that more and more people are coming to ChatGPT for real-time information, and we hope we can continue to improve and build better utility in the search product.”

As part of a new partnership with OpenAI, INMA hosted the first in a series of six Webinars to explore how AI can enhance journalism and operations. The recent Webinar, OpenAI and News, featured Lim and INMA’s Sonali Verma and Jodie Hopperton.

Verma, head of the INMA Generative AI Initiative, explained the Webinar was part of a broader partnership that will cover a range of activities including AI workshops and OpenAI credits for corporate members. To kick off the partnership, INMA brought in Lim to explain how OpenAI is collaborating with news organisations to strengthen journalism through artificial intelligence.

Lim emphasised that OpenAI’s mission — to develop and deploy AI to benefit everyone — deeply aligns with the news industry’s core purpose: “to inform, educate, and empower people all over the world.”

With a background spanning both newsroom and platform roles, Lim understands the challenges publishers face in reaching audiences meaningfully. She described OpenAI’s partnership with INMA as a natural fit, born from months of dialogue and shaped around three pillars: education, regional workshops, and hands-on experimentation.

“Together we really wanted to create something that gave publishers more direct support; a space to explore how AI could actually be useful to your work and the way that you’re reaching your consumers,” Lim said.

The power of chat

While today’s chat experience is rather text-heavy, Lim said OpenAI is working to make the ChatGPT search experience more visually engaging. It is evolving to include image thumbnails and richer visual elements.

If news companies allow OpenAI’s search crawler, their article images or social tags can appear alongside search results, enhancing visibility and user engagement. “This should be a really low-lift way to make your content more visually rich within ChatGPT,” she said.

Lim also introduced ChatGPT Pulse, a new feature designed to deliver personalised updates to users each morning. It is currently a limited preview release that is only available to pro users, allowing the company to “gather feedback and iterate before we make this available to a broader set of users.”

Rather than a reactive Q&A format, Pulse provides proactive, curated content based on user preferences and past interactions.

“I’m incredibly excited because I think this gives publishers one additional surface area to reach users and additional distribution points within ChatGPT, one that’s built around personalisation and user preferences,” Lim said.

Lim sent a clear message that OpenAI is here to support journalism, not disrupt it. ChatGPT Enterprise offers tools to help news brands thrive in a digital ecosystem that values trust, relevance, and innovation.

“We really want to make sure that ChatGPT can help your teams do the best work,” she said, pointing to features like Connectors, which can be customised for each organisation and will help team members find information more easily: “What we’re trying to accomplish with Connectors is reducing that barrier to information and then allowing your employees to use that knowledge to make their work more actionable and personalised.

Shared Projects, a newly introduced feature, enables team members to collaborate within ChatGPT. “So imagine a reporting project or an RFP and editors, reporters, social teams can all work together in the same hub and every user has the same access to the same files, the same set of instructions, the same context.”

As the media landscape continues to evolve, Lim envisioned a more collaborative and proactive future — one in which OpenAI amplifies the mission of journalism rather than replacing it.

Moving at the speed of change

Jodie Hopperton, lead of INMA’s Product and Tech Initiative, then offered a look at how AI is reshaping the news media landscape.

She began by framing AI through four key lenses relevant to publishers: business efficiencies, product innovation, consumer behaviour disruption, and relationships with large language models (LLMs).

Hopperton emphasised that while AI presents challenges, the industry’s overall sentiment is optimistic. A recent INMA survey revealed that generative AI ranks high among internal investment priorities, with C-suite leaders viewing it as a major opportunity for growth.

One of the most striking shifts Hopperton highlighted is the move from traditional search to AI-powered answer engines.

“This isn’t just on the likes of AI platforms like ChatGPT, like Gemini; this is everywhere,” she said.

Consumers are increasingly asking direct questions and expecting personalised, conversational responses. This shift demands that publishers rethink how news is discovered, delivered, and monetised.

Hopperton also explored how AI is changing the user experience; AI-integrated browsers, such as Arc and Comet, provide users with tailored updates and even take action on their behalf. “As we move from search we move to answer, but one of the things we’re coming into now with agentic AI is action,” she said.

She gave the example of shopping for recipe ingredients on Amazon’s Whole Foods platform. After entering a recipe, the ingredients are automatically added to her cart. Such innovations are challenging news media companies to reevaluate their content formats and distribution strategies.

“We are looking at new rules of distribution,” she said, noting journalists are now just one source of information in a fragmented and rapidly changing landscape. “It’s highly personalised and it’s getting much more complex. We have got to figure out how we show up as our individual brands.”  

Ultimately, Hopperton called on news companies to scenario-plan for an AI-first future. “What do AI-first journeys look like? How do your products fit in? Get into the heads of your customers,” she urged. “Everyone should be doing this right now, and we need to get ready for these different scenarios.”

From theory to practice

To wrap up the Webinar, Verma focused on real-world applications of AI across the news industry. She emphasised that AI is already transforming editorial workflows, customer service, audience engagement, and advertising.

Norway’s Amedia, for example, uses AI at every stage of content creation — from ideation and transcription to headline generation and distribution. Similarly, Schibsted built an AI-powered pipeline to analyse open-ended customer feedback, tagging sentiment and urgency to route issues efficiently.

“Schibsted has seen a 70% increase in the volume of user feedback that they can capture thanks to this, and the analysis time is now minutes instead of days. They also have instant real-time insights for their product and editorial teams,” Verma said.

In the U.K., The Telegraph replaced cumbersome reports with instant, AI-generated dashboards and e-mail summaries, while Germany’s Medienhub deployed a voice bot to handle 30,000 monthly delivery-related calls. The bot is so efficient that only 5% of callers request to speak with a human agent, and the project paid for itself in six months.

Verma also showcased creative automation, such as HT Media’s multi-format content repurposing: “They take news copy and turn it into a number of formats, all of which have higher engagement than the text story. It’s fully automated, and it’s based on the text version of the news story.”

At Newsquest, an AI assistant is used for routine crime reporting, whilst The Washington Post and Associated Press used AI tools such as object detection and transcription to support Pulitzer-nominated investigations. AnThe Globe and Mail in Canada is one of many publications using generative AI in the creative process for advertising and marketing, Verma said.

Personalisation also emerged as a key theme; Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung offers a slider for “easy language” versions of articles, while The Telegraph displays only unread updates in evolving news stories. Meanwhile, Scroll India is experimenting with a format that lets readers choose between 20, 200, or 2,000-word versions of the same article.

Audio is another frontier where AI is being leveraged; Time Magazine, Schibsted, and Business Insider are using AI to deliver personalised audio briefings, increasing engagement and accessibility.

In advertising, Hearst built a sales assistant to help reps tailor pitches, and The New York Times developed “Brand Match,” an AI tool that scans content to create custom audience segments — outperforming industry benchmarks.

“This is what all of this looks like in practice,” Verma said, adding that the next five OpenAI Webinars will focus on “practical concrete examples of AI” and provide ways for news media companies to get results.

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