5 predictions for AI’s growing role in the media in 2026

For the past two years, I’ve written predictions for how AI will continue to change the media industry and the business of news in the coming year. Prognosticating is a risky business even at the most tranquil of times, and media’s AI era is anything but: bots are multiplying, newsrooms are shrinking, and new business models always seem to be still developing.

Last year, four of the five predictions I made came true, those being the spread of audio experiences like NotebookLM’s audio overviews, a greater emphasis on content licensing, more “legit” AI-generated content, and publishers doing more with their own summarization and chatbots. I should have probably known my one strike was going to be agents—that was such a buzzword last year that I couldn’t avoid including it, but it turns out there were significant barriers keeping agents outside the mainstream (data privacy and complexity being the main ones).

This time, the task is even more challenging. Many trends, like AI adoption in newsrooms, are further along, which you would think makes their effects easier to predict. But the reality is that the most impactful things happen when those trends slam into realities, such as Cloudflare taking a hard stance against AI ingesting publisher content without compensation or consequence. Who saw that coming?

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With all that in mind, here are my predictions for how AI’s presence in media will evolve in the next year:

1. The copyright issue gets worse before it gets better

Despite an ever-growing set of lawsuits, the copyright issue is still largely unresolved. Publishers want compensation for how their content is ingested and used by AI companies, which continue to claim fair use. Sure, there are more licensing deals between the two sides, but the fundamental tension remains.

What’s changed is that more publishers have woken up to what they see as the predations of the AI industry, and they’ve gotten more aggressive at blocking AI crawlers. That prevents AI engines from bringing users the best, most up-to-date data, which makes them less competitive.

This, however, doesn’t apply to Google, because it uses the same crawler for search and AI, and no publisher in their right mind would ever block Google Search. That gives Google a competitive advantage at a time where OpenAI just went into “code red” for fear of falling behind. Similarly, Perplexity is now the target for legal action from both News Corp. and The New York Times for how it summarizes their content.

For any AI company in a race with Google, it’s hard to see how they can balance respecting copyright with staying competitive. If even the tremendously successful OpenAI sees the threat as existential, it’s hard to see how any of them wouldn’t see the copyright issue as secondary. My expectation: Not only will AI companies avoid making moves that broadly support content providers (such as enabling them to block user agents)—they may even become more brazen about ignoring safeguards like the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

2. AI focus in newsrooms shifts to product and revenue

When The New York Times opened the doors for AI use by its staff, it was an indicator that newsrooms were becoming more comfortable with using AI to improve efficiency with things like transcription and social media management.

Similarly, the launch of more sophisticated AI-infused products like Times AI Agent—which turns the publication’s vast archive into a grounded, AI-ready corpus—signals a shift toward AI products that could potentially improve the bottom line. Whether that opens up real revenue is unclear, and the road is certainly longer and bumpier than deploying an AI headline writer (Politico recently got into hot water with its newsroom union over an AI tool for its lucrative Politico Pro division), but the potential rewards are great enough that we’re sure to see more publishers go this route.

3. PR’s lean renaissance

The era of “go direct” PR led many to postulate that the whole industry might face a steep decline, if not become entirely obsolete. However, AI has revived PR for a new era: Since AI engines look for credibility across domains and platforms, the ability to get a story cited widely, even on lesser-known sites, is newly valuable.

However, AI is also forcing the industry to rethink the basics—even more than the media. Since much of PR work involves content, and it doesn’t have the same audience relationship that has kept almost all journalism authentically human, there’s intense pressure on the client side to leverage AI in content generation to cut costs. That all translates into a strengthened PR industry, but one that’s by necessity smarter and leaner than before.

4. Authenticity reasserts itself

When generative AI first arrived, there was existential dread that big chunks of journalism would end up being authored by AI. While AI has secured a place in many newsrooms, that prediction largely hasn’t come to pass. That’s not because AI isn’t capable of researching, analyzing, and writing stories, but because AI authorship alters the audience relationship.

In other words, human authenticity is back in style. AI can still be an accelerant here, helping more publications adopt video formats like the Times “explain the news” vertical shorts. With AI reducing the cost of production, the choice of expanding to a new platform will have more to do with audience opportunity, as it should be.

5. Continued prioritization of owned audience

Just because we’re likely not going to Google Zero, doesn’t mean media properties can relax. A world of “Google Smaller” still means publishers will need to keep divesting from strategies dependent on SEO traffic, and direct their energies toward building and nurturing direct, habitual audience relationships through proprietary apps and formats with traditionally higher engagement, like newsletters and live events. The bad news: the more who do, the harder it will be to stand out.

It may still be early days for AI, but we’re well past the point of no return. More and more people are using it for information discovery (34%, up from 18% a year ago, per the Reuters Institute) and journalists continue to adopt AI as part of their workflows (more than half now use it at least once a week). The industry is clearly adapting to the new AI reality, and whether or not we get clearer answers to the big questions around copyright and business models, 2026 might be the year the media’s AI survival manual gets written.

source https://www.fastcompany.com/91460618/ai-media-5-predictions-2026