Nhi Le

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.

Over the past two decades, platforms have fundamentally reshaped journalism: reach often outweighed relevance, algorithms competed with editorial judgement, and platform power challenged media independence. Now generative AI is driving the next transformation, changing how information is created, discovered and valued. What lessons has journalism learned from the platform era—and which warnings came too late? Do news organizations need smarter AI strategies, stronger regulation, or entirely new approaches to remain relevant and independent? 

This discussion explores how journalism can navigate technological change without losing its public mission.