AI podcast experiments march on with Forbes’ new daily audio briefing

The Daily Brief, which launched on May 29, is also a signal that publishers are still willing to experiment with audience-facing, generative AI products — despite previous mishaps. Last December, The Washington Post used AI to build a pick-your-own-format news podcast, letting listeners choose the topics, hosts and length to create custom versions, called “Your Personal Podcast.”

But it soon became the center of tense exchanges among senior newsroom leaders and the product team at the Post, criticizing the podcast when it was found to be rife with errors and hallucinations. Those who defended the product felt the errors were part of the process of rolling out a new product, according to Semafor. “Your Personal Podcast” remains up and running on the Post’s mobile app.

Lauren Soni, svp of product and tech at Forbes, said her teams learned from The Washington Post’s experience. Keeping a human in the loop is an essential part of the “Daily Brief,” she said. Before a briefing goes out each day, a human checks the episode, according to Soni.

“A lot of the pitfalls [can come from] a rush to speed to market, and without thinking through the quality and the integrity that we’re looking to uphold. So for us, AI is helping us extend that reach, getting in front of people who consume news differently on their commute, at their desk, walking the dog. The journalism is getting all of the credit, the writers get the attribution, the audience just gets it in a new format,” Soni said.

Like The Washington Post, Forbes sees monetization opportunities around its AI audio experience. Forbes’ sales and marketing teams are currently pitching the product to clients, discussing pre-roll ads, “sponsored by” labels or topic curation, Soni said.

Glenn Rubenstein, founder and CEO of podcast advertising agency Adopter Media, said having humans verify the authenticity of the daily AI news briefing gives Forbes’ product a “level of credibility.” However, he said it remains to be seen what the listener demand is for The Daily Brief, and interest from advertisers will hinge on that engagement.

“It’s almost funny for someone to offer a customized AI product when in theory you can just go to the LLM source and say… ‘What’s going in the news today that would interest me?’ So that’s the challenge,” Rubenstein said. 

Publishers raced to build AI chatbots on their own sites, but driving adoption proved difficult when users could get similar responses by going straight to ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants they were already using.

Rubenstein also pointed to the under-delivery issues with ChatGPT’s ads business as an example of ads in AI experiences remaining an underdeveloped area. “No one’s cracked advertising with AI,” he said.

Two weeks since its launch, The Daily Brief is among the top five most-engaged features on the Forbes homepage, based on user interaction rates, according to Soni.

The Daily Brief isn’t the only consumer-facing, AI-powered product Forbes has recently launched. The publisher also used AI to rebuild Real-Time Billionaires, a database of all the billionaires in the world. A whole host of industry-wide challenges — from referral traffic declines to audiences spending more time on other platforms — made it harder to get readers to Real-Time Billionaires, Soni said. 

So Forbes held its first hackathon to solve the problem. Product, design and engineering teams had two days to figure out: “How do you turn a first-time Forbes visitor into a loyal, repeat user using AI, without compromising trust, quality and editorial standards?” Soni said. 

The teams vibe-coded their way to the new Real-Time Billionaires, using AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini and Figma Make. The product went from a static list of billionaires to an interactive database, with features such as cohort filters (including “women billionaires,” and “top billionaires in tech”), biographies, stats and related editorial content.

Since the changes, Real-Time Billionaires now has five times the overall interaction rate (33%), a click-through rate increase from about 1% to 24%, and an average time spent on page of 2 minutes, up from 95 seconds. The database reached 1 million pageviews in its first month since relaunching, according to Soni. Vibe-coding also meant the new Real-Time Billionaires was ready to launch in half the time, she added. The product went live on May 5.

Forbes is also exploring sponsorship opportunities for the Real-Time Billionaire product, Soni said. “Deeper engagement naturally creates better inventory, so there’s a business case for building products people actually want to use,” she said.

“This is the new way of doing software development and product development,” Soni said. “We’re… thinking about which aspects of the organization will naturally see slightly higher adoption [of these AI tools], and then using that as almost a test bed to go through structured training, tooling access, and ongoing enablement before we pick up and focus on other aspects of the organization.”