At the first INMA Product & Tech Advisory Council meeting of the year, senior media product and technology leaders from around the world compared notes on their focus areas for 2026.

Despite operating in very different markets and different company structures, the conversation quickly converged. The same pressures — slowing growth, rising costs, platform disruption, and rapid advances in AI — mean similar decisions. What emerged was not a list of tools or tactics but a shared set of priorities for 2026.

These are the big themes shaping how media companies are reorganising, rebuilding, and repositioning themselves for what comes next:

1. From restructuring to execution at speed

Many organisations have either spent the past 12 to 24 months simplifying — flattening structures, reducing costs, and centralising capabilities — or are in the midst of it now. The focus for 2026 shifts to execution or, as one executive put it, “from simplify to amplify.”

Product and engineering teams are getting smaller, more senior, and more tightly aligned around specific projects. Speed is coming from clarity: fewer handoffs, sharper briefs, and rapid prototyping over long planning cycles, sometimes using agentic AI. Rather than building for every brand or edge case, teams are prioritising scalable foundations that can be reused and adapted.

The message was consistent: Simplification was necessary, but it only creates value if it frees capacity to move faster.

2. AI moves from experiment to core infrastructure

AI is no longer sitting in labs or pilot projects. In 2026, news leaders expect it to be embedded across product development, workflows, monetisation, and decision making.

Experiments are no longer enough. AI initiatives must demonstrate clear ROI, either through cost reduction, revenue lift, or speed to market. There’s also growing urgency around preparing for agentic AI, where automated agents may increasingly mediate discovery, subscriptions, and purchasing decisions on behalf of users.

This raises a new strategic question: not just how media companies will use AI internally, but how will their products, brands, and offers be presented to machines making choices for consumers?

3. Monetisation becomes more dynamic, intent-driven, and cross-brand

Static pricing models are under pressure. Across the discussion, monetisation strategies are becoming more flexible, more contextual, and more closely tied to user intent.

Smarter paywalls, dynamic pricing, seamless commerce, and bundled offerings are all part of the mix. There’s growing confidence that content itself — not demographics — is a powerful signal of intent, opening new possibilities for advertising and licensing.

At the same time, cross-brand strategies are gaining momentum with companies looking to increase engagement and lifetime value by connecting products, formats, and audiences across their portfolios rather than optimising in isolation.

Note: My colleague Greg Piechota, lead of the INMA Readers First Initiative, has and is continuing to do incredible work on everything around subscriptions (details here). And Gabe Dorosz, who kicked off the INMA Advertising Initiative with a bang last year, will be delving into (agentic) commerce and B2B revenue (details here).   

4. Product, data, and architecture must enable personalisation at scale

Personalisation is no longer a differentiator; it’s a baseline expectation. The challenge is making it work across brands, platforms, and markets without creating unmanageable complexity.

Many leaders pointed to technical bottlenecks: legacy front ends, fragmented data, and systems that don’t scale easily across organisations. In response, there’s increasing interest in modular architectures, off-the-shelf data products, and AI-assisted modernisation that allows teams to move faster without rebuilding everything from scratch.

Enablement — not invention — is becoming the defining product challenge.

5. Preparing for a post-search, agent-mediated relationship with audiences

Finally, there was broad recognition that search is no longer a growth engine it once was. As traffic plateaus or declines, attention is shifting to habit formation, community reengagement, games and live formats, and direct relationships with audiences.

Layered on top of this is the expectation that AI agents will increasingly sit between publishers and consumers. This forces a rethink of discovery, branding, loyalty, and the end-to-end news journey — not just for humans but for machines acting on their behalf.

The takeaway from the council was clear: 2026 is not about chasing the next shiny tool. It’s about building organisations, products, and systems that can execute faster, monetise smarter, and operate in an environment where AI is both a collaborator and a customer.

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