By 2026, most major newsrooms have moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization, while maintaining public trust as a central priority.
This week on Newsroom Robots, I sit down with Uli Köppen, Chief AI Officer at Bavarian Broadcasting (BR), to talk about what it really looks like to lead AI strategy inside one of Europe’s largest public broadcasting networks.
This marks Uli’s third appearance on the podcast. In our first conversation, we explored how BR’s AI lab was pioneering personalized audio news through its Remix Regional prototype. In our second, we caught up on how those early experiments were beginning to scale.
This time, the scope is much bigger. Uli is now responsible not only for BR’s AI lab, but also for AI implementation across the entire organization.
Uli makes a compelling case for why every newsroom should establish a dedicated AI leadership function, backed by an interdisciplinary governance structure. We also spend time on a question that is defining the next phase of AI strategy for many newsrooms: in a world of AI overviews, zero-click search, and agent-driven information retrieval, how do you maintain your brand as a recognizable, trustworthy source? Uli shares why BR opted out of AI crawling and what they are building instead, including a vision for a verified content data pool that could power new products across multiple media organizations.
In this episode, we cover:
02:09 — What it means to be Chief AI Officer at a public broadcaster
06:30 — Why every newsroom needs an interdisciplinary AI board, not just a single AI leader
09:06 — The skills newsrooms need to build for an AI-driven environment
11:00 — Why reinventing workflows starts before adding any technology
16:28 — Inside the Oktoberfest Chatbot and the collaborative content pool powering it
23:40 — Using AI for smarter community engagement and real-time moderation
26:30 — The personalized audio news briefing that users love and where it’s headed
36:00 — How BR’s AI guidelines evolved from broad guardrails to clear, example-based rules
41:40 — The strategic question: be part of AI platforms, or build recognizable products of your own?
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Uli Köppen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.
