Recent INMA study tours in Silicon Valley and New Delhi emphasised that news media companies worldwide face many of the same questions around generative AI and future technology.

During Tuesday’s Webinar, members heard from Jodie Hopperton, Product Initiative lead for INMA, and Ritvvij Parrikh, senior director of product for The Times of India/digital, to look at what they had learned from companies on the recent study tours. Gen AI and future tech: reflections from Silicon Valley and New Dehli allowed them to share their views and takeaways — and offer advice on what companies should be considering for the future.

Chat becomes the new search

With so many big changes taking place, it’s nearly impossible to single out one that is the most impactful. But one major shift, Hopperton said, is that chat will become the new search.

Unlike Google or other search engines, which require users to enter a few words and then scour the links it finds, chat is more intuitive: “What AI and generative AI allow us to do is have whole chat conversations,” she said. “It just makes it so much easier. You can ask a question and you get an answer. It’s more intuitive to humans.”

That requires news publishers to also change the way they look at SEO; if consumers are turning to chat for answers, the rigorous SEO efforts won’t have the kind of payoff publishers have seen in the past.

“Companies such as Andi and Google are working this. They’re trying to figure out ways to combine the two where they can look at the sourcing, but that isn’t being done yet, and we are still very reliant on as an industry on that search function on that top of funnel,” Hopperton said. “So that’s something we’ve really got to keep an eye on.”

Other things to keep an eye on include large language models, or LLMS (which can put together sequences of words but can’t provide context), and misinformation (which continues to be more problematic as AI becomes more sophisticated). These two areas are presently questions that need solutions.

AI opportunities

Although it brings challenges, AI has incredible opportunities for the industry. It can improve workflows and become a research assistant, headline generator, help with personalising content, and providing summaries of long pieces of text. It can offer a synthetic voice to narrate articles and expand the options for the way people consume content.

The responsibility falls on news publishers to look at how to meld their innate abilities with AI’s opportunities.

“We need to focus on our strengths. We are great at content,” Hopperton said. Companies should focus on creating great content while relying on other companies with experience in things like creating synthetic voices and other new formats for sharing content.

 Amidst rapid change, the c-suite has also started looking at how to harness the opportunities of AI, with 51% of those polled at INMA World Congress in May saying that AI will provide the opportunity to achieve more with the same amount of resources.

“One of the things that I think has become very apparent is we can make incremental changes, but this gives us the opportunity to make some really big changes,” Hopperton said. At the same time, it will cost some of the direct relationships publishers have enjoyed with users: “Again, this comes back to chat, right? It comes back to losing that search and having people funnel directly through. We’re going to have to figure that out.”

Investing in the future

The recent New Delhi study tour uncovered many of the same findings as the Silicon Valley tour, Parrikh said: Chat is replacing search, LLMs have entered the picture, and the shifts being made are significant and lasting ones.

In light of that, it is time for news media companies to look at how they will invest in AI.

“Any investment in AI is fraught with dangers due to multiple reasons,” he said. “First, AI is an extremely fast-moving technology. Every week something changes.” Therefore, committing to a specific technology could mean that it changes completely in just a few weeks or months. The supply of talent who can work on it is limited at the moment, too, and there are significant costs involved.

But the biggest challenge he sees is the ability to manage change within the newsroom: “Are we as people ready to adopt the change that is required to adopt AI fully?”

For companies to invest in AI, they must first determine what success will look like for them. “Often we’ve seen newsrooms invest in AI for a media buzz because it creates excitement for the brand,” he said. Parrikh pointed to a framework created by Ezra Erman that helps determine whether to invest in AI.

That framework includes three key factors: automation, augmentation, and transformation.

“When you use AI to automate certain tasks, it’s very important to get your cost modelling right and ensure that you are attributing the cost saving back to the automation,” Parrikh said. Otherwise, the company won’t see a reduction in costs because they’ll overspend on AI and manpower.

Outside tools and information are needed to augment decision-making and ensure your costs will pay off. And finally, transforming how the company works is a bet that must be considered to ensure it will pay off.

“Your bet needs to be big enough that it’s able to make a meaningful transformation in your business,” Parrikh said.

He urged news publishers to be careful and intentional about their investments in AI:

“The more calculated and thoughtful you are in terms of driving proactive change within the newsroom, the better it’ll be. Make one investment in AI with a very clear objective, mature that investment, fully get returns from it, start earning money from it — and then reinvest back into another initiative. Otherwise, it’s very easy to outstretch yourself and have 50 unbaked ideas.”

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