Inside Dow Jones’s AI governance strategy, with Ingrid Verschuren

“The function of this cross-functional steering committee is really to ensure that whatever we do with gen AI fits with our core principles,” Ingrid Verschuren, evp of data and AI and gm of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Dow Jones, said in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast during the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 30.

Formed roughly 18 months ago, the steering committee comprises 10 members from across Dow Jones’s organization, with representatives from the editorial and the commercial sides of the business as well as the company’s legal and technology teams. The committee members meet every two weeks to evaluate internal as well as external use cases for generative AI. Those use cases can range from how the newsrooms of Dow Jones’s own publications implement the technology into their journalism to how AI companies may ingest Dow Jones content into their large language models.

“We want to be absolutely sure that we get fairly compensated for the content. We want also to be sure that it’s very transparent both to use [in] how our content is being used and similarly to the users [so] that they know where the content is coming from,” said Verschuren.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

The AI steering committee’s role

We look at every single request that we get and then decide can we actually accept the risk? Can we accept it but we need to mitigate? If you need to mitigate, what are the guardrails? And then make sure that ultimately the people from [the] department the request comes from, they are the ones who then execute on it. We don’t get involved in execution.

The steering committee’s centrality

The committee has access to all of the different use cases [in how generative AI tools are being implemented across the organization]. So when we get a request for a different use case, we can actually say, “Oh, have you spoken to this department because they are using this [AI model]?” The other thing that we are really, really trying to do and [are] very conscious of [is] we want to make sure that whatever we develop can be applied in multiple instances.

Dow Jones’s core principles

We want to make sure our content is being used in a transparent way and that we are being fairly compensated for the use of our content. That is the first core principle. The second principle is really we act as an arbiter for other publishers. And then thirdly, we want to innovate because ultimately we do believe that AI is going to help our business. We see it as an augmentation of journalism.

The steering committee in action

One of the decisions we needed to make was whether we were going to allow others to [use generative AI to] translate our content or whether we actually wanted to keep control over the translations. And that was discussed in the AI steering committee, and we reached the decision that ultimately the translation is still a representation of our content. Hence we made the decision that actually we want to control the translations.