By 2026, most leading newsrooms have moved past the question of whether AI belongs in their organization. Now the key question is: what does a sustainable AI product strategy look like when you’re building for a subscription-based business and a high-trust brand?
This week on Newsroom Robots, I sit down with Alessandro Alviani, Lead for Generative AI, and Fabian Heckenberger, Managing Editor for AI, at Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung to discuss how they’re using AI to build the next generation of news products.
This conversation looks at what happens when AI becomes a permanent layer in a newsroom’s product stack. You start thinking less about “tools” and more about systems for adoption, transparency, quality control, and learning from real usage.
Alessandro and Fabian walk through how they’re designing AI experiences that fit naturally with reader behavior and how they’re developing new distribution and accessibility formats that would have been impossible to sustain manually.
We also go deep on a topic that’s becoming a defining competency which is operational trust. What do you monitor once an AI product is live? How do you categorize failures? And how do you respond quickly when something goes wrong, without panic and without eroding your brand?
In this episode, we cover:
02:52 — How editorial and product roles complement each other in AI strategy
13:13 — Addressing skepticism and fear around AI in the newsroom
25:17 — Inside building the German election chatbot
31:10 — The design framework that signals AI content without eroding trust
35:30 — Real-time risk management and monitoring for live AI tools
48:50 — The two questions every newsroom should ask before greenlighting an AI project
54:55 — Closing reflections and personal AI use
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Alessandro Alviani and Fabian Heckenberger on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.
