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Challenge Board: The platform era for publishers gives way to AI

This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →

Publishers are still very much living in the platform era. But they are also straddling the AI era, with the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity standing in as the next generation of platforms for publishers to deal with, as the recent Digiday Publishing Summit made clear.

“The AI era is going to challenge us in completely new and different ways,” said Bloomberg Media chief digital officer Julia Beizer.

During closed-door town hall sessions and in interviews with Digiday, publishing executives discussed the challenges they face, from traditional platforms like Facebook and Reddit as well as those posed by the new AI platforms. And from what they had to say, the methods for addressing those two sets of challenges may not be all that different, as covered in the video below.

“What we have to realize is that we can’t rely on other platforms to send us traffic. We have to create that demand loop itself,” said Katie Friedman, chief subscriptions officer at Business Insider.

Watch the video for more.

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