The Agent Layer: Finding Journalism's Place in the AI Ecosystem

Soon, most of the entities accessing your journalism won’t be people—they’ll be AI agents acting on someone’s behalf and they will never see your homepage. Newsrooms still treat AI as a tool for research, factchecking and production. But “tool” is the wrong word, and “in the loop” is already the wrong reassurance. AI is becoming the layer between media and audiences, shifting demand to the agent while production costs fall toward zero.

In his keynote, Ole Reissmann, Director of AI at SPIEGEL Group, explores what breaks structurally and how news organizations need to show up in the emerging agent layer.