Transforming news articles to be AI agent friendly
Article as agent
Eeman went a step further, arguing that an opportunity for media businesses is to think about the “article as agent,” embedding that actionable functionality within the page itself.
“The value of the journalism is for utility,” Eeman said. “So, in that context, news is no longer a destination, it’s rather a function. The question is not ‘Where can we bring people?’ but ‘What services can we bring within these environments?’ An article could actually act like an agent that explains something, that helps you to prepare something, that compares things, that monitors [things] that change over time.”
Shishkin pointed out this is already happening to some extent within the B2B space, which has the benefit of presenting information in a more agent-friendly manner as a matter of course. “This is developing more rapidly, and already there are examples of news organisations that are building dedicated pipelines for their enterprise customers.”
None of which to say turning a news site into an agent-first destination is easy or even necessarily desirable. There are many steps that need to be undertaken before it is possible.
Shishkin said he “completely disagrees” that tech firms should develop the tests about what makes news content useful for agents in isolation, and that establishing mutually beneficial licensing terms needs to happen before any of that is worthwhile.
Both speakers noted that these changes are upstream, and should not supercede publishers’ need to provide for their human audiences. Instead, they said, the downstream playbook that focuses on fostering community is still absolutely vital. The key is providing value in utility for agents, and regionality and specificity for human readers.
