This week, our co-founder Petr Hamerník attended WAN IFRA’s AI Forum in Frankfurt, a conference connecting AI innovation and journalism. This was his third time attending, and the shift in maturity since last year’s events in Paris and Frankfurt is clear. We are seeing a move from tentative experiments to the deployment of production-grade tools integrated into daily newsroom workflows.
Key Technical Trends from the Forum
- Agentic RAG: The focus has shifted toward more autonomous workflows, specifically for navigating and querying large media archives.
- Architecture for Agents: Systems are increasingly designed for machine-to-machine interaction. Whether through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), standard APIs, or CLIs, the goal is interoperability between different AI agents.
- The Monetization Gap: The industry is still grappling with how to monetize content crawled by LLM providers. Progress is slow, ranging from detection and blocking to emerging concepts like “Really Simple Licensing,” where a crawler or agent pays for access autonomously.
On Implementation and Adoption
A recurring theme (already visible last year) is that development must happen in close collaboration with newsrooms. Extensive training, workshops, and even informal “coffee and breakfast” sessions are essential for high adoption rates.
Build vs. Buy
The “build vs. buy” debate is evolving in the GenAI era:
- Buy: Prioritizes speed to market and shifts the burden of maintenance to the vendor.
- Build: Allows for a bespoke fit. While “vibe coding” has lowered the barrier to entry for initial versions, the long-term Total Cost of Ownership remains unproven for many.
In our experience as developers, the “prototype trap” is real. Building a functional demo is straightforward, but maintaining a production-ready system – handling edge cases, model drift, and constant API updates – is where the complexity lies. This is often where the “buy” model proves its value.
Conclusion
The forum was a great opportunity to reconnect with the community and see the impressive work being done across the industry. Thank you to the WAN-IFRA organizers for a great program. If we missed each other this time, I’ll see you in Marseille in June!
