Before most organizations even figure out how to talk about AI, John Levitt, COO of Elvex, is already watching their teams use it. Not in theory—in screenshare windows, Slack threads, pitch meetings, and late-night editorial adjustments. His vantage point is unusual: he sees the small decisions that eventually reshape an entire newsroom.
In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal explores with Levitt the path that media companies walk when they adopt AI. And this isn’t theory—it’s not about what AI might do. It’s about what it is already doing. The tasks being automated. The hesitation at first login. The first moment something clicks. The cultural shift that follows. And how leaders either set the tone for trust, or fracture it.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Newsrooms are being asked to move faster than ever while resources continue to shrink. More content. More platforms. More competition for attention. Meanwhile, teams keep hearing the directive to start “using AI,” often without guidance on how to do that responsibly, effectively, or in ways that maintain trust.
This conversation pulls AI down from the abstract. It looks at where it fits in everyday editorial work, how it supports sales and product teams, and how leaders can introduce AI without signaling replacement or loss. The takeaway is not that AI changes journalism, but that it can remove the work that gets in the way of journalism so that reporting, analysis, and editorial judgment become the center again.
WHAT WE COVER
• How newsroom culture determines whether AI succeeds or fails
• Why leadership framing shapes adoption more than any tool
• The first use cases that create value without destabilizing workflow
• How to use AI for research, fact checking, content repackaging, and audience insight
• Where sales and business teams find immediate ROI
• The move from prompt engineering to context engineering
• Why the future of media involves agents working with agents
IN CLOSING
The conversation around AI in the media too often gets framed as a question of replacement. Who stays. Who goes? What survives. But that framing misses something essential. Newsrooms have always evolved alongside the tools of their era. The shift from typewriters to digital workflows did not erase journalism. It expanded it. The introduction of analytics did not cheapen storytelling. It sharpened it.
What we are seeing now is not the automation of reporting. It is the return of editorial judgment. When used thoughtfully, AI does not decide the story. It simply clears the noise around it. It takes the meetings you do not need. It sorts the documents you do not have time to sort. It remembers the context you forgot you already had. It creates room for the part of the work that cannot be automated: listening, questioning, deciding what matters, and for whom.
The real opportunity is not in speed. It is in attention. The ability for journalists, editors, producers, strategists, and sales teams to reclaim the part of their work that has been eroded by volume and pace. In this way, AI does not replace the newsroom. It restores it.
The organizations that understand this first will not simply operate more efficiently. They will write better stories. They will build deeper trust. They will report with greater clarity and intention at a time when the public has never needed that more.
AI is not the future of the newsroom. The newsroom is. AI just lets us return to it. (AI-assisted)
GUEST: John Levitt
https://www.elvex.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmlevitt/
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Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team
Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
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