What's on your mind lately?

At a recent AI conference in San Francisco, organized by Holtzbrinck, participants were asked to submit a bold statement in advance, which were put up on the walls of the conference room. One of the statements by a colleague from a US book publisher read: "Liquid content turns a one-time transaction into a perpetual relationship between a reader and an idea." That stuck with me. What if the user experience doesn’t end with reading one book or one article that they’re interested in? What if we as publishers help readers to keep exploring a topic in various ways and over a longer period of time? What if we think less in terms of static products and more in terms of bodies of knowledge that we’re offering? I think using AI and human ingenuity, there’s a lot we can do and build in the next couple of years.

Are we taking AI seriously enough?

Yes and no. Almost everyone in the media would agree by now that AI will transform the way we work and how journalism will be consumed. We’re all working to integrate AI tools into our workflows and building new AI-based features for our audiences. There are two things, however, that we should treat with more urgency: One is the rise of agents. As difficult as it is to predict how the agentic web will unfold, we need to think more about its effects on journalism and media consumption. And secondly, one response to AI in general should be to define and amplify the human element in what we do – our eye-witness reporting, our news judgement based on many years of experience, our ability to connect people and bring together communities, to name a few examples.

⁠What's a good hobby to pick up?

Hut-to-hut hiking in the alps. You’re unlikely to run into any agents, the views are amazing and real, and no prompt will get you to the top.