Product lessons: How AI is changing what publishers build – and what audiences experience

For product leaders at news organisations, AI is quickly reshaping priorities, team structures and development processes. Two Congress sessions look at what that means in practice: for the people building the products, and for the audiences on the receiving end.

Product leadership: How AI is rewriting the rulebook

The Tuesday morning session Product Visions for Navigating Disruptive Change covers the full scope of how AI is impacting how product leaders work. Product leaders have always juggled competing demands – serving the newsroom, satisfying commercial imperatives and keeping audiences front and centre. Now AI is rewriting the rulebook. Hear from leading product executives on how the role is evolving: what they’re building differently, where they’re using AI to move faster, and how they’re holding the line on what matters most.

Three product leaders will provide their perspectives on how AI is reshaping their and their teams’ work:
Jan Helin, Chief Product Officer at Bonnier News in Sweden, will discuss how AI is influencing product decisions and development, and what the rise of agentic AI means for how product teams are structured.
Jessica Davis, VP of AI Product at USA Today Co, brings a front-line view: operating in the US market means her team faces the full force of AI platform rollouts before most of the world does.
Pundi Sriram, CPO at The Hindu Group, brings learnings specifically around their app business; AI-powered features like summarisation are already driving measurable increases in app usage and revenue. He also sees how vibe coding is starting to challenge traditional development processes in the newsroom.

What you will take away

• Practical examples of how product strategy can accelerate the delivery of new news experiences 
• How AI can drive additional revenue from new product features that drive engagement
• Insights from the US, where AI platforms roll out products ahead of the rest of the world

Tuesday June 2 | 11.00

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News that knows what you need: how AI is transforming the audience experience

AI isn’t just changing how news is made – it’s changing how it’s experienced and what is possible. From liquid content that adapts to context, to apps and agents that anticipate what audiences need before they ask to rethink how news is delivered and even what is possible to deliver, the possibilities for publishers are expanding fast. The Wednesday morning session How AI is Transforming the News Experience cuts through the hype to examine what’s actually working: new products and reimagined user experiences that serve audiences with radically different wants and needs.

The speaker line-up constitutes a mega panel of product and user experience leaders who will be moderated by media advisor Dmitry Shishkin:

Sannuta Raghu is the Executive Producer and AI Lead at Scroll.in, an Indian publishing company developing new publications as well as the technology to deliver them to mobile phones, tablets, and other digital devices. Scroll is leaning into scraping, including expecting their content to be scraped. They’ve designed an on-site experience architected around liquid content so that if the content is going to flow everywhere, the best version of it will be on their own site.

Markus Knall, Chief Editor and Content Director at Ippen Digital, brings one of Europe’s most concrete examples of AI-driven local coverage at scale – using automation to cover communities and stories in ways and at a scale that weren’t possible even two years ago.

Astrid Maier, Chief Deputy Editor and Head of Strategy at dpa, Germany’s national news agency, is rethinking what a wire service even is in the age of AI. At the heart of that rethink is a question she shares with Sannuta Raghu: what is the atomic unit of news – and how does that change when content needs to be liquid?

Hye Seung Seo, Managing Editor at AJU Media Group, South Korea, represents a different dimension of AI’s possibilities: using it not just to transform production, but to cross language barriers – taking South Korean content and distributing it in Chinese and English at a speed and scale only possible with the use of AI.

What you will take away

• An understanding of liquid content and AI-driven personalisation – what it means in practice for your newsroom.
• How AI is changing what it means to be a news agency and what a news agency can deliver
• Practical ways that AI is allowing local publishers to radically expand the coverage they provide communities

Wednesday June 3 | 09.00