Artificial intelligence strategies in European public broadcasters: Uses, forecasts and future challenges

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) gains space in the media, public broadcasters are testing and experimenting with these technologies to raise their services to the new standards of the audiovisual ecosystem. From algorithms that help recommend the most suitable content for users, to others that detect news and automate some of the tasks of journalists, these tools are increasingly present in public audiovisual corporations. The data were obtained from semi-structured in-depth interviews with a convenience sample of 15 corporations from 12 countries. The results reflect a heterogeneous application of artificial intelligence in corporations, oriented towards the automatic creation of content from structured data, the improvement of audience interaction through chatbots, and personalisation or verification. The implementation of these technologies also poses major challenges. Firstly, the economic cost of adapting these systems to each corporation and the difficulties in hiring experts to develop AI solutions prevent a complete deployment of these tools in public broadcasters. As main conclusions, we have understood that AI as a “culture” is believed to be vital for the public audiovisual services of the future, although its application is still far from being a standard and generally does not occupy a relevant strategic position in the innovation departments of corporations.