• by Ray Schultz , Yesterday

Axel Springer, owner of Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt, is going all in on artificial intelligence (AI). 

“Nobody in the company has to explain in the company why she or he is using AI to do something — whether to prepare a presentation or analyze a document,” said CEO Mathias Döpfner during an hour-long all-employee meeting last week, Status reports. “You only have to explain if you didn’t use AI. That’s really something you have to explain because that shouldn’t happen.” 

Döpfner also lauded the development of AI.  

“I tell you -- what is happening at the moment with regard to technology is the biggest change in modern civilization," he said. "The first wave of internet is nothing against these developments.” 

Döpfner has long championed AI. “Digital is the new print,” he said during an executive meeting in June. “AI is the new digital.” 

On that occasion, Döpfner also called for creation of a third business in addition to the two it already has — journalism and media marketing. 

“We have to build a high-margin, hyper-growth business beyond journalism and marketing media, a third pillar as a strategic hedge,” said Döpfner, speaking during a strategy meeting attended by 100 executives in Berlin. 

In 2023, Axel Springer signed a deal that would allow OpenAI to use its content to train AI models. 

That same year, Döpfner said in a CNN interview that he does not see AI as “see it as a structural enemy of journalism. I see it as a potential friend. Why? Because we can come up with new products that we could have never afforded before."

He added: "And we can basically delegate the boring stuff of our business — translation, technical production, fact-checking, to a certain degree aggregation of information that is already out there — we can delegate that to bots, to artificial intelligence and focus on the very essence of our business, and that is news: To find out something that was not supposed to be found out.”