The AI conversation has shifted over the past year for publishing leaders. The question is no longer whether to invest in AI, but where to focus and how to tell which AI programs will deliver the best business value.
Drawing on insight from our new white paper, which provides a meta analysis of real publishers’ AI strategies, this article outlines nine practical focus areas to help you level up with peers, compound leverage and see real revenue growth.
Efficiency: Necessary, But No Longer Differentiating
Sometimes, efficiency sounds like AI’s second name. Everyone talks about automating “mundane tasks.” Publishers might still be waiting for AI to do their dishes after a long work day, but while in office, 75% of them told WAN-IFRA in late 2025 that they’ve used it to increase efficiency.
Most haven’t reached cross-company integration yet, but many told WAN-IFRA that they’ve improved content production, sped up their publishing schedules and allocated resources better. It might be the baseline expectation now, but there’s still time to catch up.
Action Steps to Leveling Up with Peers
- Automate your most time consuming administrative work. Have your team track their tasks for a week, get AI to analyze this data, and prioritize the top tasks to automate. The idea is to free more time for creativity, strategy and activities that directly drive business impact.
- Make AI a journalist’s best assistant. Have it review documents and visuals to identify patterns and gaps for potential new stories or story angles.
- Unify data across your media house’s brands and departments. You might have a cooking hobbyist audience member, who also cares about home decor, gardening or even music. To send them the best message at the best time, you need a deeper level of understanding, insight and automation.
Data Activation: Where Leverage Starts to Compound
Your media company likely collects a ton of data, but data is only as valuable as what you do with it.
And customers want you to do something meaningful for them. 80% of media and entertainment customer respondents told Salesforce “their experiences should be better given all the data collected” on them.
Thankfully, this is one of AI’s biggest strengths. With the right AI and data combination, you can build the foundation for a significant business advantage.
Action Steps to Turning Your Data into a Business Advantage
- Prioritize first party data no matter what Google says this year. No publishing professional will forget the constant threats and delays regarding third party cookie deprecation, only to get the news, years later, of “well, never mind, let’s keep using them.” Nonetheless, continuing to rely on these cookies alone is a huge risk. Google can change its mind again. Moreover, once you have your own data, you can do a lot more, like building your own premium ad product, as we cover in the white paper.
- Learn how to serve your audience better. Use AI to analyze what they consume most, what they type into your search bar only to come up empty handed, what content your competitors are serving them and what gaps they’ve left for you to fill. As mentioned above, you can unify data across your own brands and departments and personalize messaging based on a more holistic reader or viewer perspective.
- Discover complementary audiences. Maybe you’re missing complementary audiences – related interests, different languages, diverse cultural perspectives – that would be relatively simple to serve with everything else you’ve built. Use AI to analyze data from your own organization, the internet, open source databases, you name it, and make a business plan for new revenue streams.
New Media Assets: The Clearest Revenue Growth
First, it was social media. Now, AI chatbots and summaries. Everyone is getting a bite of publishers’ impressions. As a result, advertising went from a top revenue source in 2023 to the most at-risk revenue channel, as described by 61% of the media industry professionals that Salesforce surveyed in 2024.
As brands try to adjust to the no click life in 2026, publishers need to expand where their revenue comes from. One way is to automatically produce new media assets from content you’ve already created.
Action Steps to Unlocking New Revenue Streams
- Turn your existing content into new formats. AI can easily turn text to audio and video, and vice versa. It can turn long form videos into short clips. You don’t need to be everywhere in every format for every brand, but you do have more options to scale the mountains of content your media company has already created for years, or even decades.
- Localize existing content. Similarly, tailor content you already have to additional cultures. We’ve had translation tools for a long time. Now, use AI to go a step further and tap into cultural sensitivities and needs when repurposing content.
- Personalize at scale. Everyone talks about personalized newsletters, but some publishers are automatically providing personalized AI podcasts to their audience members – again, based on content that these publishers already produced. With the variety of tools available today, you can likely automate personalized video shows as well.
Of course, these are just some examples. Publishers across the world are growing more and more creative in turning this constantly changing technology into a growth engine. We researched it, so you won’t have to.
How Real Publishers Make a Bottom Line Impact with AI: Case Studies & Meta Analysis
Keep this in mind if you’re feeling overwhelmed:
75% of media industry professionals surveyed told WAN-IFRA in late 2025 that they’ve increased efficiency using AI, but only 9% “can point to direct revenue gains” from AI, according to the report.
You’re not late, and you don’t have to do all the things at once to succeed.
As our white paper shows, even one or two really good, really focused pilot programs can land headlines, engagement and revenue. Read about fellow publishers’ AI programs in our white paper, alongside a meta analysis of industry data, and let us know what you’ll be testing first.
