AI is no longer a distant disruption for media platforms; it has already arrived as an organising force within newsrooms. While it promises speed, scale and efficiency, it also sharpens unresolved questions of trust, bias, revenue and control. As algorithms increasingly shape what societies see and believe, can journalism retain its human core?
It was in January 2017 that I sat down for a Power Talk interview with Sundar Pichai, the man who had recently taken over as the CEO of Google. He spoke at length about what he believed was an inflection point for Artificial Intelligence, arguing that there was a technological revolution every ten years. It was the personal computer in the 1980s, the internet ten years later, and then the smartphone. He felt we were approaching an AI inflection point that we would only truly appreciate years later. He also said that the real AI revolution would come when people with domain expertise figured out how to use AI to transform their own sectors.
That was it. Within months, I had quit my TV news career to explore how AI could impact media, especially video news. In the years that have followed, the scale and impact of the AI revolution have left the world stunned—and I suspect we are still only in Act One of this particular saga.