One Year Later

After a year of newsletters and AI classes, The Media Copilot now offers consulting, including custom chatbots for any website.

The Media Copilot is about to turn one. Things have changed a lot since I blasted out my first newsletter on October 3, 2023 — both in the media world as well as my tiny AI-focused corner of it. I have a few announcements as I prepare for Year 2, but first a little background.

When I launched The Media Copilot, I set out on a mission: to learn everything I could about how AI is both changing and becoming a part of the media, and to pass on that knowledge to anyone interested. At the time, I didn't have much in the way of plans beyond that. Plenty of journalists I admired had struck out on their own on Substack, so I decided to do the same, launching this newsletter along with a podcast since I had experience doing both.

Soon after, a contact asked me to visit his New York office to speak to his team about "this AI stuff." That went really well, and in 2024 I officially launched The Media Copilot's online AI courses, and I began regularly teaching creative professionals — mainly in journalism, PR, and marketing — the ins and outs of using AI in their work.

As I write this in October 2024, hundreds of people have taken my AI Fundamentals class, and along the way several people and businesses have reached out asking if I could help them with guidance on how to apply AI to specific workflows, give strategic advice, or build a custom tool. 

I've been quietly doing this kind of consulting for a while, but today I'm making it official: I'm taking on clients who have more specific needs in applying AI, particularly in content and communications. Of course, I'm still offering AI training for creative teams, but for organizations that want to integrate AI more holistically or are exploring custom tools, I may be able to help — probably for a lot less than you'd pay an agency.

And when I say official, I mean website official. If you drop by mediacopilot.ai, you'll see a spiffy new home for all the services I offer beyond the newsletter and podcast. The AI training classes I offer are all listed, there's the aforementioned consulting business, and one more thing you may spot in the lower-right corner: a chatbot.

The Media Copilot Enters the Chat

This isn't just any chatbot. It's actually a new service that I'm excited to start offering as part of my consulting business: chatbots for content sites. In partnership with Querlo, The Media Copilot can introduce a chat interface for any website, creating a new way for your audience to interact with your content — and potentially deepen their engagement.

If you're skeptical whether readers actually want to "chat" with your site's content, I don't blame you. While ChatGPT has taken off, chat interfaces don't necessarily make sense in every situation. On top of that, chatbots have been known to make mistakes sometimes, which don't make for the best experience.

However, consider this: AI chatbots and AI-powered search engines have rapidly risen to become a significant part of how people get information online. That's altering habits on a mass scale, and audiences naturally gravitate to experiences that reduce friction. If readers can't find the specific info they want, there's a good chance they'll go to Google, Perplexity or some other chat interface that creates an AI summary, and often their journey will end there. 

Moreover, even if your content is surfaced in an AI summary on one of these chat platforms, there's no way to know anything about the person who asked for it, or the query that created it.  However, with your own chatbot, you'll be able to see, in real time, what your audience is asking and what those queries are serving up.

How Can Sites Benefit from Chatbots?

This is the core of what chat can offer publishers, especially smaller ones: a window into what your audience cares about and how they go about finding it. The kinds of queries readers put into chatbots are fundamentally different from search terms. Instead of short snippets, people can be verbose and specific when using chat, and that in turn will give insights into the topics they care most about. That data serves as a Rosetta Stone for your content strategy, with your most loyal readers pointing directly to the topics best suited for deepening their engagement.

While a chatbot has clear benefits, deploying it properly takes care and rapid iteration. For sites with a large content corpus, starting with a subset of articles on a single topic is often the best approach. The Washington Post's Climate Answers chatbot is a great example of this idea. You also need to think carefully about what you want your readers to do when they talk to chatbot: Do you simply want them to read more content, or take some specific action, such as subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a survey?

Ultimately, deciding comes down to developing a comprehensive strategic plan around the chat experience as well as a great deal of organizing and categorizing — a.k.a. "knowledge management" — of the corpus. That's where I come in: Alongside Querlo's tech team, I'll find the best way to build your site's chat experience and be with you every step of the way as you deploy it and refine it.

While chat isn't going to take over every interaction online, it's destined to become an ever-greater part of our information ecosystem. You look at ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, the new hardware experiences that Meta is developing with its Orion glasses, and Apple’s upgrades to Siri with Apple Intelligence, and you can start to picture a future where computers increasingly provide information through answers, not options.

For publishers to have a say in what those answers are, they need to understand them. And the shortest path to doing that is getting a peek at the questions.

Eager to learn more? I'll be hosting a LinkedIn Live with Querlo CEO Francesco Rulli this Friday, Oct. 4 at 11 a.m. ET to talk more about our partnership and why publishers should think about chat as the next frontier of audience interaction. Get it on your calendar here, and if you'd like to start exploring chat today, get in touch!