Graham Wilkinson Last week an article in the New York Times entitled, The Rise of the Robot Reporter outlined the growth of automation in journalism. The article stated that roughly a third of the content produced by Bloomberg is now automated in some form or other by a platform they call Cyborg.
The content that Cyborg produces is predominantly associated with quarterly company earnings reports. It has the ability to analyze a financial report upon release, extract the most important facts and figures and then publish a story. This is a great example of automation relieving humans from the monotony of certain tasks, but more than anything speed is the impetus behind this initiative.
Bloomberg and Reuters not only compete with each other in this space of Business Reporting but they now have to face hedge funds releasing countless AI powered financial insights. AI and Machine Learning has been embedded within the Finance industry for some time and is now being put to good use to gain competitive advantage in the insights arms race.
This got me thinking about the application of ‘Robot Reporters’ or ‘Robot Analysts’ for Media Agencies and the industry as a whole. Just like financial journalists don’t relish the prospect of writing commentary for quarterly earnings reports, it’s fair to say that performance data commentary is not one of the most appealing aspects (or strengths) of our industry.
There has been a huge business intelligence drive for at least the last 5 years to reduce time spent on manual reporting and increase the accessibility of performance data. It’s currently very common to find instances of Tableau, Google Data Studio, Datarama and Power BI in most agencies and brands. If we were to introduce NLG (Natural Language Generation) technology into reporting/dashboard workflows could we continue to drive efficiency, reduce erroneous commentary and further increase the accessibility and usefulness of data.
Although these business intelligence platforms are prevalent today, the industry still has a long way to go to truly making BI more efficient, accurate, accessible and useful. It seems to me that while automated reporting is still permeating through the industry we should now be focussing on automated insight generation in a similar fashion to the ‘Robot Reporters’ described above.
In my opinion this should be one of the next big automation pushes for marketers, one where the true benefits of machines and humans working together can really be highlighted.
