At Press Gazette’s Future of Media Trends event in London on Wednesday, senior UK media figures spent much of the morning circling a single question: how can publishers turn the rise of AI into a business model rather than a threat? The clearest answer on the table was the prospect of AI content marketplaces, a system that would let publishers charge for the use of their material as AI tools increasingly rely on news content to answer users’ questions.

The gathering, held at South Place Hotel, brought together around 60 senior representatives from across the industry for a series of closed-door roundtables. The mood was cautious rather than hopeful, but there were still signs of opportunity. One specialist B2B publisher said it had become one of the most frequently cited titles by AI chatbots and now sees those systems as a way to broaden the brand’s reach. Another publisher described strong subscription growth, with crime and sport driving demand. A third pointed to an AI-powered dinosaur avatar built into its content management system to help journalists sharpen headlines and improve copy.

Across the sessions, publishers repeatedly returned to the question of how to use AI internally without surrendering too much editorial control. One discussion, chaired under the banner of FT Strategies, focused on making better use of archives and concluded that publishers need to be more assertive about the value of their own material rather than simply adapting to the demands of AI firms. Another, backed by Dataplan, considered how automation can help newsrooms repurpose stories across formats, while acknowledging that the balance between efficiency and human judgement remains unsettled.

Advertising, bot protection and video strategy also featured heavily. A table sponsored by Swipefinder examined how to improve ad performance without damaging the reader experience, with participants arguing that trust and usability remain central to the commercial case for publishing. Admiral’s roundtable focused on AI co-pilots and the defensive and offensive uses of the technology, with blocking unwanted bots emerging as a persistent concern. Storyful’s session on video highlighted the promise of AI for sourcing and publishing clips, alongside the risks of getting it wrong.

The broad consensus, according to attendees, was that AI can be useful but only when kept under close human supervision. Hallucinations and other errors remain a major concern, and publishers said they still need strong editorial checks before trusting machine-generated output. That caution sat alongside a more strategic ambition: to push for a licensing market in which publishers are paid when AI systems draw on their work.

That hope is being fed by developments elsewhere in the tech sector. Axios reported that Microsoft is building infrastructure for what it calls an "agentic web", including a two-sided marketplace designed to compensate publishers for data and citations used by AI services. TechCrunch and other outlets have also reported that Amazon is exploring a similar marketplace for publishers and AI firms, while the UK-based SPUR coalition is said to be seeking a collective system for publishers to control access to their sites. For now, though, the money has not arrived, and publishers remain frustrated that a fast-growing AI economy is still being powered largely by unauthorised scraping and the diversion of audience traffic.

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Source: Noah Wire Services