It's incredible to think how far generative AI has come in recent years. In last week's keynote speech at Newsrewired, Ezra Eeman, strategy and innovation director at the Dutch public broadcaster NPO, put us firmly in the picture. It was a wake-up call for news publishers to realise just how fundamentally news publishing is changing before our very eyes. And there's even more change on the horizon.

"We are entering what I'd call the second act of gen AI," he says.

The years between 2022 and 2025 have been characterised by an explosion of AI startups, experimental use of the tech and widespread early adoption. But that era is pretty much over.

Eeman described how generative AI is not the fascinating, shiny new tech anymore for many users. It's now embedded in daily work, with platforms like ChatGPT handling 2.5 billion prompts a day and reaching 900 million weekly users, including a 220 per cent rise among over-45s in the UK. The question is no longer whether or not to use AI, it's: how do we as news publishers adopt it at scale?