We have worked with news and media producers, digital publishers and marketing agencies all across the world, including in Europe, India, the Middle East and Africa.. After working with us, some feel inspired to embrace AI tools and systems completely, at every step of their workflow. Others chose to take a more cautious ‘stepped’ approach, initially integrating new AI systems in a few key areas first.
There is no right or wrong approach.
Whilst we can help with Generative AI tools that directly output synthetic media, we advise using it on your output cautiously. But AI tools can help in so many other ways.
Whilst some have experimented offline with various AI tools, no news or media producer has yet tried a new AI Tool introduced by us and then later changed their mind and stopped using it.
Based on feedback from our clients, we are finding the following improvements in production quality and efficiency.
STORY GENERATION
Using AI tools to find scoops, source stories by cross-referencing data and generate story ideas has generally, on average, seen a 30% increase in new story ideas in organisations that adopt them. It has been vital in supporting and being responsible for many recent big investigative journalism stories.
RESEARCH
AI research tools generally improve the depth of the storytelling by a degree equivalent to a 100% increase in research time, for the same period. In other words, generally, AI tools can make research time twice as productive.
PITCHING & COMMISSIONING
AI pitching and proposal tools not only improve the quality of stories, project ideas and submissions by focusing the perspective of the originator, but they also allow faster submission of those proposals. This gives the editors more interesting new projects to choose from.
It’s difficult to quantify the improvement in the proposals, but we’re hearing reports of a 20 to 40% increase in the number of feature projects being submitted to editors by staff (especially when allied with AI research tools).
PLANNING & STORYBOARDS
We’re hearing that teams are seeing real ‘on-location’ gains from the improved planning quality as a result of using these new AI tools when they’re used strategically together. On-location recce, set-up, acquisition and production time is said to be reduced by around 10 to 25%. We envision this figure improving further with time.
CONTENT & CONTRIBUTOR AQUISITION
We don’t have any real metrics for this area, except for one particular AI tool for sourcing stock imagery. This is said to have cut search times by, in some cases, up to 90%, whilst also increasing the quality of the content found and saving 30 to 50% in licensing costs.
ARCHIVE MANAGEMENT
For organisations that have adopted AI Archive Management systems, we’re seeing an increase in the in-house usage of library material by up to 30%, giving better quality editorial depth. Also, better quality searches and a substantial reduction in man hours ingesting, logging and running the archive.
Some organisations are now monetising their archives by using these new tools to create public-facing archives that can be bought or licensed.
WRITING
For those organisations that have taken on AI writing assistants, we’re hearing of a 25% average increase in production for the same man hours. No clients have reported to us that they have tried this way of working and later abandoned it.
Some have tried full-text creation, synthetic blog writing, email campaign production and more. Most have reported impressive, although not quantified results. Although we encourage innovation, we would also advise caution in this area. Impressive short-term results could be overshadowed by long-term damage to an organisation’s integrity if synthetic content is used carelessly or mixed too freely with ‘human’ content.
MEDIA PRODUCTION
From ‘photos’ to illustrations, vectors, cartoon images, infographics, design pitches, music, sound effects and video, no one can ignore the power of Generative AI and what it can produce for an organisation’s output.
When used carefully and ‘correctly’, organisations are reporting a colossal improvement in almost every form by the use of synthetic media, whether that’s in production quality, production time or production cost. But again, we’d advise extreme caution in how you use this synthetic content.
WEBSITE PRODUCTION
We have seen countless websites and sub-sites created using the AI tools we have advised. In every case, website and subset production time is cut from weeks to hours.
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
We’re hearing very positive things about the improvement in audience numbers, rate of growth, audience engagement and audience retention as a result of the joined-up strategic use of the right AI tools. We’ve been given some crazy and very mixed metrics here, but with so many different approaches being tried, we can’t give any realistic ballpark figures.
Political parties are already using AI for micro-targeting campaigns with game-changing results. The retail industry is creating personalised, real-time, AI experiences to engage and sell to customers. The amount of money being pumped into these two ‘innovations’ demonstrates the scale of successes they are already achieving. News and media organisations have only just scratched the surface of experimenting with audience engagement automation like this.
This is an area where AI is already having an impact and we predict this will be the biggest and fastest area of AI influence for media organisations.
PUBLICATION MANAGEMENT
Equally, we see this area of AI usage (especially when combined with Audience Engagement tools) as being indispensable within a matter of months.
We have numerous examples of organisations and individuals using AI to build channels with skyrocketing audience numbers, thereby generating five-figure monthly incomes.
These are just the main workflow areas of AI integration. We can suggest and support you with AI integrations in many other related work areas, such as…
- Front-of-house optimisation
- Logistics, fleet and resource optimisation
- Human resource optimisation and team building
- Set and studio design
- WordPress publishing, automation and optimisation
- Merchandise design, production and selling
And many other areas. We’re constantly being asked for new and innovative ways that AI may be able to help in very niche situations and are nearly always coming up with credible and game-changing solutions. So try us.