Two digital innovation experts outlined a clear roadmap for media organizations seeking to survive and thrive in the age of artificial intelligence.
On the left, Claudia Báez, and on the right, Adriana Lacy, during their presentations at SIPConnect 2026.
As part of the SIPConnect event, two digital innovation experts outlined a clear roadmap for media organizations seeking to survive and thrive in the age of artificial intelligence. The conclusion was unanimous: it is not enough to simply “use” tools; success depends on strategic integration and a profound shift in how we understand those who consume our news.
Claudia Báez, a digital innovation strategist and member of Fathm, warned about a common phenomenon in newsrooms: experimentation without direction. According to Báez, there is a difference between simply using a tool and achieving true integration within a media organization.
“The confusion between using and integrating costs money, time, and credibility,” Báez stated. For the expert, many media outlets are trapped in a cycle of “a lot of activity and little change”: they test a tool, launch an enthusiastic pilot project, but without measurements or real impact.
Báez argued that the gap between “using” and “integrating” is a matter of leadership and governance, not technology. To move beyond the pilot phase, she proposed five fundamental pillars:
As an example of success, she highlighted the case of Chequeado in Argentina and its Nunchi project. It is not merely an AI bot, but an infrastructure that “listens” to thousands of comments across social networks and platforms, labels them according to sentiment and intent, and delivers actionable summaries directly through Slack so editors can make real-time decisions about reputation and editorial errors. The goal was not to build a tool, but rather a system.
For her part, Adriana Lacy, founder of Adriana Lacy Consulting, urged media organizations to rethink their relationship with audiences. Lacy argued that newsrooms continue to describe their audiences demographically (age, location), while AI systems already understand them in situational terms.
“For 20 years, knowing your audience meant knowing who they were. But from now on, it really means understanding the situation they are in. It is about understanding what truly matters in that context and how we can provide valuable information,” Lacy explained.
According to the expert, search engines and chatbots do not process identity in the same way social networks do; they place greater importance on user context and intent.
To help media organizations navigate this transition, Lacy introduced the TCI framework (Task, Context, Intent):
To illustrate this model, Lacy proposed imagining a critical scenario in which a major storm is about to hit a community. While the traditional demographic approach only describes the audience’s age or place of residence, applying the TCI framework allows journalists to move beyond statistics and deliver truly useful journalism.
In this way, coverage evolves from the general task of helping people keep their homes safe through evacuation guides and traffic information, to considering the specific context of a reader who lives in a flood-prone area and must pick up their children from school.
The future of journalism requires a dual effort. On one hand, media organizations must learn to integrate artificial intelligence structurally—a transformation that, as Báez noted, must be led from the top to prevent technology from remaining on the margins of the newsroom.
On the other hand, media outlets must leverage their greatest competitive advantage over algorithms: their deep knowledge of their audiences. As Lacy stated: “You know your communities much better than these search engines ever could.” The key is to combine technological integration with human connection in order to deliver unique value.
