News
2 min read
August 25, 2026
Media and comms site Influencing.com sat down with AITC’s Shaun Davies this month for a piece on AI and the news business. (Side note: we promise that in future months you’ll hear more from Chloe Brice, Adam Rollason and the other consultants, rather than just endless Shaun.)
Here are a few quotes and points from Nigel Bowen's interview:
“Shaun comes at it from both sides of the desk. He's a former journalist at News Corp, ninemsn and the BBC, and he spent seven years at Microsoft building the machine-learning systems that moderated content on MSN, before GPT-4 arrived and changed the maths overnight.” (Actually, it was five years, but I have spent seven years at Microsoft in total over two stints — Shaun)
“Shaun’s argument is that AI isn't what's going to kill journalism. What's killing it is the business model. Good reporting is ‘expensive and quickly commoditised,’ and he doesn't see anyone funding it sustainably, whether it's AI or influencers and podcasters lifting the news the moment it breaks. His forecast for the industry is ‘a rocky few years, slash, decade’.
“His advice to journalists is not to wait it out. He says to engage with AI and learn how it works, treating it as a tool with real strengths and weaknesses. Then lean into what models can't do, finding new information and building the relationships that surface stories someone would rather bury.”
Read the full piece on Influencing.com
