New report with learnings from the first AI Launchpad Programme 2024
FT Strategies, supported by the Google News Initiative, is proud to share the learnings from the first-ever AI Launchpad programme, the first of its kind and the first in the EMEA region.
The programme took place from February to July 2024 and welcomed participating publishers from eight countries across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. The AI Launchpad focuses on three practical questions to help publishers leverage AI in their organisations such as:
- Where do I start and what applications of AI should I experiment with first?
- Should I ‘Build or Buy’ AI technology?
- How do I embed AI in my business beyond initial experiments and proofs of concepts?
This report focuses in particular on the ‘Build vs Buy’ question and details experiments that were run by participants during this programme. In this report, you will find:
- Our proprietary framework for identifying AI use cases in a news business
- An overview of ‘Build vs Buy’ considerations in the context of AI experiments
- Detailed case studies of in-house and vendor-enabled experiments run by publishers during this programme
- A full list of experiments run during this programme
We’re grateful to the eight publishers that took part courtesy of our partnership with the Google News Initiative:
- De Telegraaf, Mediahuis (The Netherlands)
- Delfi (Estonia)
- El País, Prisa (Spain)
- Hürriyet, Demirören (Türkiye)
- Capital, Economedia (Bulgaria)
- Kronen Zeitung (Austria)
- Tages Anzeiger, Tamedia (Switzerland)
- ynet (Israel)
These publishers were selected from over 100 applicants due to their technical capabilities, commitment to AI adoption and digital audience reach. We would also like to thank our partner vendors who were part of these projects (Smartocto, Dataminr, Wondercraft and Bridged Media) as well as those who joined us to demo use cases during the programme (Pixels.ai, Viafoura, Miso.ai, Labelbox and InsurAds).
We look forward to discussing the findings of the report with the wider industry in the coming months. You can learn more about the programmes that we run in partnership with Google News Initiative here.
