How do you redesign a newsroom’s entire workflow when AI is no longer a single tool, but a collection of agents, voice interfaces, and ambient intelligence changing how journalism gets produced?
This week on Newsroom Robots, I sit down with Markus Franz, Chief Technology Officer at Ippen Digital, one of Germany’s largest digital media networks with more than 80 online news and media portals. We recorded this episode live at the Digital Growth Summit in Stuttgart, where Markus and I explored how his team is building some of the most forward-looking AI experiments in European media.
Markus leads Ippen Digital’s Incubator Lab, an innovation unit focused on reimagining how publishing and AI-driven experiences will evolve. With 16 years inside the company, Markus has been central to Ippen’s digital transformation and now leads efforts around multi-agent architectures and building adaptive workflows for the newsroom.
In our conversation, Markus breaks down how his lab is experimenting with multi-agent “virtual teams,” voice-first newsroom interfaces, multimodal content production and an ambient AI-powered newsroom where intelligent systems support journalists in real time. He shares what his team has learned from early prototypes, why the biggest challenges are cultural rather than technical, and how news organizations should think about guardrails, platform dependency, and the rise of self-evolving models.
In this episode, we cover:
02:22 – Why Ippen Digital built an Incubator Lab and how it’s structured as a future-focused R&D unit
04:49 – What multi-agent systems look like inside a newsroom
9:42 – The case for voice as the next major interface for both journalists and audiences
14:41 – The shift from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop workflows
17:40 – Guardrails for agent systems: grounding, bounding, editorial policies
19:33 – The vision for an ambient newsroom powered by AI companions and real-time intelligence
27:31 – Why vendor lock-in and self-evolving LLMs pose new strategic risks
30:08 – Multimodal personalization and rethinking how news is experienced
34:27 – Why most AI pilots fail and what experimentation looks like in practice
49:19 – Markus’s personal AI stack and how he uses these tools day-to-day
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Markus Franz, recorded live in Germany, on on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
