Before AI can think for Immediate Media, it needs clean data to think with

“Our single biggest priority next year is around the quality of our data and building that so that if you are layering any agents over, you can trust what they are going to be doing,” he continued. 

That work started about a year ago when Lamaa and his team began pulling together and standardizing its data sources into a single customer data platform. It’s no small task for a company that sits on everything from subscription and audience data to e-commerce signals. Think of it as building the brain that will eventually power Immediate Media’s wider AI ambitions. The British publishing house produces a range of magazine titles, including Radio Times, BBC Top Gear and Good Food.

Those ambitions are anchored in subscriptions, especially digital, which overtook print last year and now accounts for roughly 745,000 of a total 1.3 million subscribers. The idea is that cleaner, more connected data will make it easier to pinpoint who’s likely to subscribe and focus marketing efforts where they count. 

In a way, it’s not too dissimilar to what the Financial Times has done with its own AI-powered paywall. 

“We’re quite behind in terms of understanding who are the right people to serve advertising to and who are the right people to be serving subscriptions,” said Lamaa. 

That’s where agents come in. 

One already in use by the publisher’s sales team helps respond to briefs faster. It’s layered on top of Immediate Media’s audience insights tool Prism and taps into everything from audience segmentation and traffic data to post-campaign analysis and reporting. Extending that to subscriptions is the logical next step as the company moves toward an agentic system – a coordinated network of tools designed to handle complex, multi-step workflows. 

“We’re trying to bring together all the different data points across the business so that we can understand the average revenue per user, of the different types of audiences that we have,” said Lamaa. “Then we can layer that into an agent – so creating a direct integration with our data platform to be able to say at this time of day or on this website, this person is more likely to want to engage with five more articles or ultimately create a subscription to allow them to tap into some of the product capabilities that we have.”

But it won’t stop there. 

Like the Financial Times, Immediate Media wants to build an AI-powered subscriptions business that’s just as effective at keeping subscribers as it is at finding them. As Lamaa explained: “That’s the other question we’re working through – ‘how do we effectively retain our users? And how are we creating the product development roadmap on our apps or on our websites to incentivize them to build that habitual behavior.”

What those AI agents won’t be doing is selling ads. Immediate Media’s ads business relies on branded content rather than selling loads of inventory. Could that shift as digital ad revenue – up 5% last year — grows? Sure. But unlike News Corp, which is actively leaning into AI-driven ad selling, Immediate’s priority sits firmly on the subscription side. 

“There’s going to be a place for agents, especially if you think about standard display advertising – there’s a lot that agents can do the heavy lifting for,” Lamaa added. “Where I don’t know if it will ever work for us is that a huge portion of our revenue is focused on our brand and creating content for clients and advertisers. I’m not sure there could ever be a world where that could be transacted or done through an agent because there’s still so much reliance on creating content, creating images and creating videos.”

True, AI can mimic creativity – generate copy, render images and even produce video – but not the craft behind it. That for now, still belongs to humans. 

Even so, Immediate Media is weaving AI into how the company operates – and that kind of shift comes with tension. Two years ago when generative AI first took off, more than half the company’s staff said they were anxious about what it might mean for their work. That number has since fallen to just 5%. 

“If only 5% of our organization is anxious about it, that flips the narrative,” said Lamaa. “You’d assume most people are now proactively leaning into it.”

And they are. Roughly 58% of Immediate Media’s workforce now uses AI weekly for work, or experimentation or both.