Got a great idea on how you can tweak the design of your newsletter? Make your homepage more appealing? Freshen up your app? Create a new product?
If you’d had that great idea in the dim and distant past – say, pre-2022 – then the chances are that it would never have seen the light of day.
It would have been added to your tech team’s ever-lengthening development queue with a fairly good chance that it would never have been actioned.
A great idea stillborn.
How things have changed!
That was the message coming out of one of the panel sessions (‘How publishers are rebuilding their products for the AI era’) at this week’s PPA Festival.
AI is unblocking the bottleneck between intent and delivery, allowing publishers to experiment more easily and be more creative. It is, said Condé Nast’s Elizabeth Rostad, “collapsing the gap between ideas and prototype”.
Using AI tools, marketers and designers can create prototypes within minutes, meaning that if the idea is a good one, it can be enacted in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously. AI is transforming the way publishers are approaching product design and development.
In terms of publishers getting the most out of the AI revolution, there were three key takeaways from the session:
- Make time to experiment. If you don’t give your teams the breathing space to become familiar with the AI tools at their disposal, then you can’t hope to realise the benefits.
- Don’t lock yourself into particular solutions, be promiscuous! Things are changing so rapidly; you want the freedom to experiment with the latest AI tools when they become available.
- Don’t prototype forever. Experimentation is good, as is the ease with which prototypes can be created, but publishers need to be focused. For each project, you need to be able to articulate the point of it. Ultimately, you need to make things happen!
AI has enabled good ideas to come to life more quickly. It’s exciting! As Elizabeth Rostad said, “we’re doing things we weren’t able to do before”.
(The panel was chaired by the PPA’s Mel McVeigh and the panelists were: Ahmed Raafat (head of AI specialist solutions architects, Amazon Web Services, UK & Ireland), Elizabeth Rostad (design lead, Condé Nast), Josh Muncke (VP – generative AI, The Economist) and Josh Freeman (SVP, Partnerships, ProRata.ai.)
Finally, don’t forget to register for our ‘Subscriber Retention Special - Q&A’ webinar this coming Tuesday.
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
