Democratising AI for publishers

For the 95% of publishers who haven’t yet adopted AI, identifying a use case they can start with is usually the biggest roadblock. But the tools also need to be available for publishers to be able to support their unique revenue streams.

This week, Media Voices speaks with Maanas Mediratta, CEO at Bridged Media, about how and why making AI tools more accessible to publishers will help the whole ecosystem. Much of the AI innovation is being driven by big tech companies and industries like eCommerce, fashion and finance. But publishers have such a diversity of business models, even tools designed for media companies often won’t satisfy individual companies’ goals and needs.

Meet Maanas at Mx3 Barcelona next week (12th/13th March 2024) – there are still a few tickets left, but hurry!

Episode highlight: The need to empower publishers with AI

“AI, whether you’re talking about generative AI, NLP [Natural Language Processing] or machine learning algorithms, they’re primarily used by very, very few players, mainly Google and Facebook, to really understand the audience, see what they want, engage them, and so on. That has resulted in the media pie being shared, or being taken away from publishers. So we started Bridged Media with this objective, this vision of, how can we empower publishers by democratising AI?

“If you think about how AI is being used, especially in the media sector, it’s mainly for understanding what the visitor really wants, whether its’ to engage them, show them an offer, really analyse them and maybe sell them ads, whether that’s through direct ads or programmatic ads. But all of these algorithms are currently very, very inaccessible.

“When I say inaccessible, there are two things to it. One is talent; I think the talent resides mainly in these big tech companies that can really understand the algorithm and tailor it for a publisher. The second thing is definitely the cost, in terms of the way you can build a proof of concept – it’s not a simple thing. Publishers who have been successful with AI – think about the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times – have taken years to build a proper algorithm and spent millions. 99% of publishers cannot do this.

“To make it accessible, we feel that there are two main things we need to do. One is to reduce the amount of experience that is needed to create a proof of concept for any use case that they have in AI. And the second is pre-defined modules, out-of-the-box solutions that can be utilised for any content infrastructure by doing some tweaks and configurations.”