CEO Insider: Ladina Heimgartner’s take on Ringier’s AI transformation
Editor’s note: At our Congress last year in Krakow, Ringier pulled back the curtain on how it drives strategy sharing the ins and outs of its Digital Media Playbook. In that same collaborative spirit, Ladina Heimgartner, Head of Media and CEO of Ringier Switzerland (and WAN-IFRA’s president of the board), asked us if we would be interested in publishing her personal insights on the lessons she and the media group have learned – so far – about working with AI.
Of course we said YES! Ladina clearly has a lot to say on how the industry is developing, just as she did last month in her thought leadership piece on “The Time Waste Economy.” This is the first of seven lessons we will publish each day leading up to our World News Media Congress. The title of the first below says it all: “Building products is trivial. Running them isn’t.” Thanks, Ladina. – Dean Roper
By Ladina Heimgartner
President of WAN-IFRA and CEO Ringier Media Switzerland
You probably know this scene: the prototype of a sleek, smart digital product appears on the screen. The user experience is impressive, the demo runs smoothly. The best part: built in two days, at almost no cost. In the past, this would have been a multi-month project.
These days, it’s not just developer teams working on such demos anymore. CEOs vibe-code their own prototype on the weekend and present it in the Monday morning management meeting.
In the room, fascination mixes with a quiet disdain for the “sluggish legacy IT.”
Is it really that easy?
No.
A showcase, MVP, or prototype is not the same as a product that runs reliably 24/7, consistently meets security standards, and understands and integrates with an entire unit’s process landscape in the background.
Many companies are getting a rude awakening right now. Building even a high-involvement product has become trivial in the age of AI. Operating it, integrating it, embedding it into daily work – that’s the real Herculean task. While tech costs themselves may indeed be falling, the costs for clean integration offset those savings.
My takeaway: instead of getting frustrated and turning away from AI because the big tool keeps stumbling in everyday use, it’s worth starting small. A manual, tedious process that gets cleanly automated may not send boards into ecstasy. But five, six, seven of these invisible automations give efficiency a serious boost. And the teams celebrate it, because they’re finally freed from repetitive tasks and can lean into tasks that require more creativity or skills.
It’s not the dazzling mega-promise that drives transformation, but the small, unassuming steps that actually deliver on what they promise. Yet those small steps only scale if the ground beneath them is stable. The moment AI moves from a weekend prototype into the daily work of hundreds of employees, the question shifts from what is possible to what is permitted, from what one team can build to what an entire company can responsibly use. That is where Part 2 begins…
WAN-IFRA is working on a report about how publishers are responding to the impact of AI Search and bot traffic. We would be thrilled to have your perspective. TAKE OUR SURVEY: in English, German, French, Spanish.
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