Aliya Itzkowitz and Sam Gould (Part Two): Potential of Multimodal AI and Autonomous AI Agents in Publishing
Newsroom RobotsShow Notes
Aliya Itzkowitz and Sam Gould from FT Strategies join Nikita Roy to discuss the capabilities of multimodal AI and AI agents within the publishing industry. Discover further insights and practical examples of these technologies in the Newsroom Robots newsletter, featuring insights from host, Nikita Roy.
Aliya is a Manager at FT Strategies where she has consulted over 30 publishers across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. Her work focuses on the critical shifts facing publishers today, including rethinking revenue models and understanding how to leverage AI. Before the FT, she worked at Dataminr, bringing AI technology to newsrooms, and at Bloomberg as a journalist. Aliya has a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from the University of Oxford.
Sam is a data scientist at FT Strategies and has worked in consulting, helping clients to solve strategic business challenges using data. He has helped organizations in both the public and private sectors, from tech to healthcare to consumer products, define their AI roadmaps and strategies. He has also worked as a data scientist, designing and building data and AI systems. Sam designed the FT Strategies AI Design Sprint methodology working in partnership with the Google News Initiative.
Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Newsroom Robots
For most of journalism’s history, the article has been the atomic unit of news: a fixed container, written once and served the same way to everyone. That’s beginning to change. AI is moving out from behind the scenes, where it quietly powered efficiencies, and into the interface itself, where it can assemble, personalize, and adapt the news to each reader.
At The Seattle Times, an AI tool identified a new prospect and helped close additional ad revenue in a single day. The Seattle Times is one of 11 news organizations participating in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. Through this initiative, AI engineering fellow Rajesh Barade worked with the advertising team to address their challenges and developed a prospecting agent. This tool enables sales representatives to enter a category or focus area, identify businesses spending in that market, find decision-makers, access advertising spend data, and generate personalized outreach.
For years, the aggregator model was simple: curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten, and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen.
AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them.
Most major newsrooms have now moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization—while maintaining public trust as a central priority.