Emily Shelley, CEO of the £120mn-revenue PA Media Group, is among the 32 industry leaders participating in The Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events, in London on Wednesday 18 November.
Here, she summarises her approach to the AI challenges:
What’s the essence of your AI strategy?
We are a varied portfolio business, with the national news agency at our heart. As such, we approach our AI strategy a bit like our talent strategy, in that it needs to align to the specific needs of the business unit, but with centralised principles, approaches and resourcing. We run two tests which are applied to everything. These are essentially:
- Does it free our people, including our journalists, to do the work only they can do?
- Does it protect the trust placed in us by customers and audiences?
If it fails either, we simply don’t do it.
In practice, we have rolled out our group-wide AI programme in six steps:
- Guardrails first, so people know what’s allowed and what’s not.
- Train the leadership, then the enthusiasts, then everyone.
- Put real tools and an internal chatbot in everybody’s hands.
- Collect ideas and prototype fast, sharing the failures as openly as the wins.
- Rebuild engineering to be AI-native.
- Rebuild the tasks where the customer actually feels the benefit.
This order matters. Many organisations which have struggled have only begun at step 4 rather than at the beginning.
What have been the highlights so far?
- Our engineering teams have gone AI-native: more than half our code is now generated by AI, and the output has doubled in a year.
- At Alamy (our global images archive), we are better at copyright infringements, and we are using AI to generate metadata across the library, which makes millions more images findable, and therefore sellable.
- Our Podium business now translates racing content into languages we couldn’t previously serve.
- And we are piloting AI-assisted creation of the UK News Diary at the Press Association. This highly manual work frees our reporters to cover more stories.
The adoption isn’t uniform. But the momentum is strong and the direction is clear.
Book now for the AI media event of the year:
Only 210 can attend.
Organized by Flashes & Flames Media Ltd. Founder-owner: Colin Morrison. Producer: Cobus Heyl. Sponsorship: Jussi Makela. MediaVoices Workshops: Esther Kezia Thorpe.
