There have been a raft of announcements about AI agents. 

Let’s start with the basics

According to ChatGPT: “AI agents are intelligent systems that can perceive their environment, process information, make decisions, and take actions autonomously. Unlike simple automation tools, AI agents can learn from interactions, adapt over time, and operate with minimal human intervention.”

The promise of AI agents means more tasks can be automated. My colleague Sonali Verma, lead of the INMA Generative AI Initiative, is looking into how news media companies can use this internally. Check out this article. Here, I am looking at it from a consumer point of view and how it may affect our products. 

In the section above, I mention an example of an alert I have set up for local events. It’s pretty specific to me, and the results are good as you can see below.

An AI agent can take this one step further. It would be able to sign up for the events online, add them to my calendar, and invite my husband (or not).  

We’re moving into a world where a single system will learn so much about you as a consumer that it can deliver highly personalised information and act upon it. 

How does this relate to news?

Here are a few thoughts that spring to mind:

Firstly, we may need to rethink how we deliver news. One size does not fit all. Information is becoming more and more personalised, and consumer expectations of what a good product or service is will change with that. 

We may need to rethink “service journalism,” where instead of telling people what they could do if they want to take action, we offer actual actions that agents can follow up on.  

Here’s an example from a recent news event, the Los Angeles fires. The New York Times added “How to Help” to the navigation bar. The article gave good advice on actions consumers could take:

AI agents could take this to the next level by offering specific actions. For example, instead of a long article about it, you may see, “Would you like to donate $25 here?” and your agent would complete appropriate forms and make the donation simply by replying or clicking “yes” (or Y if we programme it for utmost simplicity!).  

Or, “It looks like you are free 1-3 pm tomorrow. Shall I sign you up to volunteer there?” — whereby the appropriate form would be completed and the calendar would be blocked.   

These are just a couple of obvious thoughts around how we may want to start iterating our products. In truth, we know this is coming, but it’s often hard to conceive of the virtually unlimited options we could use this for.

I expect to see most trails around news adjacent categories such as sports, cooking, horoscopes. Another obvious example is AI writing a meal plan for you based on what you like, how adventurous you are, how much time you have, family preferences, etc. An agent can do the grocery shopping and have it delivered at a suitable time. 

It’s an exciting period that brings many opportunities. Are you starting to think about how you’ll bring agents into your products? Are you already experimenting? If so, I’d love to hear from you. Reach me at jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.

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