But this increased use of AI means publishers large and small are continuously assessing how to best implement AI applications for efficiency without compromising editorial standards.

In this report, Digiday explores how publishers are navigating the opportunities and challenges AI brings.

Digiday+ Research surveyed 40 publisher professionals in the fourth quarter of 2025 about their use of AI and current and future investments in the technology. Digiday+ Research also conducted individual interviews with publisher executives responsible for AI investments and applications development. They are executives from:

• Business Insider
• Dow Jones
• Forbes
• People Inc. 
• Really Simple Licensing (RSL)

Publishers’ use of AI continues to expand, with AI tools becoming more integrated into daily workflows rather than being used in an experimental capacity. In Q4 2025, 93% of respondents to Digiday’s survey said that their companies use AI compared to 42% of respondents who said the same in 2022 — an undeniably large jump.

To oversee their expanding use of AI, several publishers in 2025 established AI leadership roles and teams at their companies. In July, Forbes created a 24-person “AI & Strategic Platforms Group” department to focus on growth areas including AI. In June, The Washington Post promoted Sam Han to the newly-created role of chief AI officer, while Reuters named Rob Lang as its newsroom AI editor. In May, Business Insider appointed Julia Hood as its newsroom AI lead.

Currently, exactly half of publishers are using AI exclusively for internal purposes — 50% of survey respondents said their companies only implement AI internally. Because of journalistic integrity and ethical standards, publishers have historically taken a firm stance on not using AI tools to write news content. But it is worth noting that well over a third of publishers (38%) told Digiday they use AI for both internal purposes and for content creation.

Nina Gould, chief innovation officer at Forbes, said the publisher has primarily integrated AI into its internal workflows through partnerships with Microsoft, Google and OpenAI. “We’ve been using Copilot mainly for internal communications and in some analytics because it integrates with Excel and Gemini,” Gould said. “Google opened up the LLMs for us. It’s the main chat-based search that all internal teams have been using, and we have used it to design some process automation efficiencies. … We’re going to start piloting OpenAI mostly within product development and engineering design, and then move to edit.”

Publishers’ internal use of AI tools often takes the form of increasing the speed at which work is completed by automating repetitive manual tasks like data analysis, while external applications include tools like audience-facing chatbots and advanced search functions.

Harry Hope, CTO at Business Insider, said the publisher uses AI for internal applications and for audience-facing content, and prefers to build its AI tools in-house. “Anything that affects one of our readers, a member of our audience, we have a pretty big bias towards building it with our own engineering team and leveraging our expertise,” Hope said. “When it comes to things like productivity tools, general-purpose tools and back-of-the-shop tools, that is where we tend to look for an off-the-shelf solution.”

Newsweek has opted to partner with Google to incorporate AI into its reader-facing content. In December 2025, Newsweek announced plans to build an AI-powered homepage in partnership with Google Cloud. The publisher plans to customize the homepage for each user, not just those who are logged into Newsweeks’ site. Visitors will be shown local weather, a news briefing summary and stocks, based on their geolocation.

Jonathan Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc., said that as AI continues to play a larger role for publishers, tech companies are refining their offerings from general AI solutions to specialized applications. “It’s more vertically specific solutions with AI, as opposed to AI companies trying to solve every problem, which means we’re working with more tools than we were previously,” Roberts said. “Now, teams are looking at hard problems that take a lot of work, that are very manual, and figuring out which toolset to help automate those processes.”

Also in December, The Washington Post partnered with AI voice-generating software company Eleven Labs on an audience-facing AI tool that gives users who are registered on The Post’s mobile app the ability to create an AI-generated podcast based on their choice of topics and browsing behavior. It features a pick-your-own-format news podcast that allows listeners to choose topics, hosts and program length to create custom podcasts.

“This seems like [The Post is] really creating an interactive environment for their audience to engage with the content,” said Glenn Rubenstein, founder and CEO of podcast advertising agency Adopter Media.

“The idea of a podcast you can talk back to, or converse with? That’s actually the power here,” he added, in reference to the idea of adding ads to AI-generated podcasts.

When Digiday asked publishers which applications their companies are using AI for, three applications tied for the No. 1 spot. Fifty-three percent of publisher respondents said their companies use AI for internal chatbots and AI assistants, voice-to-text translation, and multi-media generation, respectively. This tracks with Digiday’s survey finding that more than half of publishers use AI for internal purposes.

When publishers use AI for internal purposes, it’s usually to automate tasks that would take humans longer to complete. Voice-to-text translation and multi-media generation, including images, videos and music, are two tasks for which publishers use AI to save time.

The most common example of voice-to-text translation is using an AI application to transcribe an interview. However, voice-to-text translation can also be used for translating articles from one language into another. Dow Jones developed an AI-assisted auto-translation service that uses an LLM model to translate English-language news content into Korean and other languages, increasing the publication’s audience reach.

“We expanded to Japanese, German, French and Arabic, and the process has been refined,” said Ingrid Verschuren, evp of data and AI and general manager of EMEA at Dow Jones. “Ultimately it opened up a new market for us. If you use human translation, there’s always going to be a lag between when the English version publishes and when the other version publishes. … By using AI translation, we reduce lag much further than if it was human translation.”

Similarly, The New York Times offers a “listen to this article” feature through which readers can select to have an AI-generated voice read articles to them.

AI-backed multi-media generation also has a wide range of publisher uses. Commonly, publishers use AI to create images for audience-facing content. However, many publishers are also using AI-backed applications to edit video or audio content.

In 2025, Reuters experimented with using an AI agent to increase the speed of its video production process by asking AI to produce a rough edit of videos so that humans could focus on refining the final cut.

“We’ve asked the LLM to pick the best bits and create what we call a wrap edit. And it’s actually doing quite a good job,” Rob Lang, newsroom AI editor at Reuters, said at the Digiday Publishing Summit in October 2025. “That’s without even having that multimodal. So, if we can actually get the AI as an agentic AI system to understand that, to be able to look at things and compile things, we might be able to get the AI to build the edits for us, which would be quite extraordinary.”

Publishers are also using AI for internal purposes beyond multi-media generation and text-to-voice translation, such as data analysis, content creation and content management.

The New York Times uses AI to parse video and data points for its investigative reporting. In 2024, the editorial team used AI tools to sort through 500 hours of leaked Zoom recordings from an election interference group ahead of Election Day.

“You can’t Google 10,000 names … but a computer can Google 10,000 names,” said Zach Seward, editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times. “And then using AI, we could analyze those search results for certain markers that [the reporter] was interested in.”

Dow Jones’ Verschuren said the publisher has been using AI in some capacity for years — from adding descriptive keywords or categories to news articles, to analyzing data. “I was hired to manually tag news articles more than 25 years ago. … Three years later, that was completely automated,” Verschuren said.

“The biggest impact is where the machine does a better job,” she added. “The newsroom did a large investigation about airplane fumes involving analysis of over a million aviation reports. We used a combination of traditional machine learning on top of LLMs. It would have been impossible to do manually. … In the newsroom especially, the opportunity to analyze large data sets allows reporters to move faster and spend more time on editorial judgments.”

Business Insider’s Hope said the publisher has integrated AI tools into its CMS to expedite the publishing process. “Not writing the article, but generating metadata and behind-the-scenes things like titles for social platforms, category tags and taxonomy terms that we want to associate with a given story,” Hope said. “Those are intended to decrease production time and increase the velocity at which we publish. It allows writers and editors a chance to focus on the story itself, and not the nuts and bolts of publishing in a digital environment.”

“We’ve found that AI is better at doing that than humans, and humans would much rather focus on the story itself,” Hope added. “That’s where the real value is for our readers at the end of the day.”

According to Digiday’s survey, 37% of respondents said their companies use AI for content recommendation, 33% said they use AI for copy generation and 30% said they use the tech for advanced search.

Some publishers are using AI copy generation for marketing purposes like creating ads or social media posts, while others use AI for internal editorial tasks like writing article summaries — all with human oversight.

Business Insider uses AI to provide readers with content recommendations and to power search, a feature the publisher launched in June 2025. “We’ve been using various permutations of a content recommendation or personalization algorithm for quite a while,” Business Insider’s Hope said. “We’ve also rolled out a more sophisticated feature that we call the AI audio briefing — our attempt to take everything we learned from search and roll it out in a way that was ideally more useful for members that don’t want to search, or want a more passive experience.”

Forbes is also using AI applications to improve content recommendations, according to Gould. “We’re starting to use generative AI more in content recommendations and how we can get better contextual recommendations for folks — based on not just the story they’re reading, but on anything that we know about their journey to that story, preferences they’ve told us or that we’ve observed,” she said.

“We’ve seen material lifts in click-through rates,” Gould added. “That’s hugely impactful in a zero-click search world. When you have less people coming into your site, you need to focus on not just getting them, but how you can demonstrate value to build loyalty and get them to come back. Having good content recommendations and demonstrating the depth of our content is really helpful.”

When Digiday asked publishers what type of AI they use in various workflows at their companies, more survey respondents said their companies use generative AI compared with predictive AI applications — across all workflows. Generative AI creates text or media based on a data set — for example, chatbots and image generators like Midjourney. Predictive AI creates forecasts or classifications, such as statistical modeling or category tagging.

The workflows in which publisher respondents said their companies use generative AI the most were sales (62% of respondents), creative production and design (61% of respondents), and marketing (58% of respondents). More than half of respondents also said their companies use generative AI for copy editing (57% of respondents) and for editorial research (55% of respondents).

“It’s certainly powerful in the research and ideation phase, when you’re trying to get thought starters, to collate a lot of information and to figure what direction you want to go in. That’s been pretty universally adopted across all of our teams,” Forbes’ Gould said.

Less than half of survey respondents said their company uses generative AI for editorial content creation (47% of respondents) and for content management and publishing (41% of respondents).

Although the ability of generative AI applications to complete tasks has improved over the past year, the publishing executives Digiday spoke with for this report made it clear that, while they have AI tools at their disposal, they are not using AI to create news content.

“We’ve been very public and very consistent in talking about this. We won’t publish content written by a machine,” People Inc.’s Roberts said. “It doesn’t mean that we won’t use AI in the production process, but the reason is very straightforward. LLMs create the average next sentence, paragraph. Any publisher that’s in the business of creating average content in 2025, that’s not really publishing. We’ve never been in the game to create average content.”

Roberts said that when People Inc. uses AI tools for production tasks like coding, humans still guide the process. “We’re definitely still in the world where coding has a human in the loop,” Roberts said. “For example, in data science, with Gemini 3 and the new tools from OpenAI, advanced SQL queries and data exploration are getting a lot quicker. … But, you need to know the problem you’re trying to solve and how to solve it. You need to set the code off and then check that it actually solved it the right way. There’s a lot of problem design, architecture and then QA [quality assurance] required before getting productivity out of AI tools.”

At Forbes, Gould said the publisher is actively assessing the areas where teams are integrating AI tools as AI applications continue to become more sophisticated.

“As we start to get deeper into actual work products, we’re trying to think through where AI is going to fit,” Gould said. “The engineering team is using it mostly for testing or commenting code, rather than for creating code. … Our design departments have been experimenting with how to streamline the process of creating assets and distribute them to other teams. They’re also experimenting with how these tools can unlock creativity.”

Hearst has been testing how agentic AI might improve processes for its ad sales department as part of a larger sales strategy involving generative AI. Hearst is running single-modal tests, which involve an AI agent carrying out specific requests step by step — like a digital assistant following a to-do list. The publisher has encouraged sales teams to use generative AI tools for administrative tasks like CRM updating, account research, pre-call planning and creating media proposals.

Michael McCarthy, senior director of AI, sales and business solutions at Hearst, told Digiday in May 2025 that the average amount of time it takes a salesperson to complete account research using AI is two minutes, down from 40 minutes without it.

Dow Jones’ Verschuren said, regardless of which type of AI tools employees use, maintaining oversight is key. The company recently created an AI steering committee for that purpose.

“We want everybody to pick the right tool, because it’s all different workflows. The job of a marketing person is very different from that of a journalist,” Verschuren said. “Anybody who wants to use or build a tool goes through a review so that we can decide whether the tool is acceptable, but also to make sure that the tool is deployed safely, ethically and in line with our standards.”