Publishers are rapidly shifting artificial intelligence from experimental pilots to core infrastructure across their organizations. In Q4 2025, 93% of respondents to Digiday’s survey said that their companies use artificial intelligence compared to 42% of respondents who said the same in 2022, underscoring how quickly tools have moved into daily workflows. To manage this expansion, companies such as Forbes, The Washington Post, Reuters and Business Insider created dedicated artificial intelligence leadership roles and teams, while most publishers continue to prioritize internal use cases over audience-facing content creation because of journalistic and ethical concerns.
Internal automation and audience experience improvements are the primary areas of investment. Exactly 50% of survey respondents said their companies only implement artificial intelligence internally, and 38% said they use it for both internal purposes and for content creation, often with stringent human oversight. Fifty-three percent of publisher respondents said their companies use artificial intelligence for internal chatbots and artificial intelligence assistants, voice-to-text translation, and multi-media generation, respectively. Dow Jones built an artificial intelligence-assisted auto-translation service that expanded from Korean into Japanese, German, French and Arabic to reduce lag between language editions, while The New York Times uses artificial intelligence to parse massive data sets, including 500 hours of leaked Zoom recordings, and offers article narration via artificial intelligence-generated voice. Reuters is testing artificial intelligence agents to assemble rough video edits so producers can focus on final cuts, and Business Insider and Dow Jones have automated metadata tagging, taxonomy and data analysis to speed publishing and investigative work.
Audience-facing applications are growing but remain carefully controlled. According to Digiday’s survey, 37% of respondents said their companies use artificial intelligence for content recommendation, 33% said they use artificial intelligence for copy generation and 30% said they use the tech for advanced search, with Business Insider and Forbes using generative systems to power search, recommendations and personalized audio briefings that have produced material lifts in click-through rates. Yet less than half of survey respondents said their company uses generative artificial intelligence for editorial content creation, at 47% of respondents, and for content management and publishing, at 41% of respondents, and executives from People Inc. and Forbes stressed that machines do not write news and that humans stay in the loop for coding, analysis and quality control. Generative artificial intelligence is most common in sales, creative production and marketing, where 62% of respondents use it in sales, 61% in creative production and design and 58% in marketing, and companies like Hearst report that the average amount of time it takes a salesperson to complete account research using artificial intelligence is two minutes, down from 40 minutes without it. To keep pace without compromising standards, Dow Jones and others have set up steering committees and review processes so that any artificial intelligence tool deployed, from internal copilots to agentic systems, aligns with company ethics, safety requirements and the distinct needs of journalists, marketers and technologists.
