AI Publisher Response Agenda
To learn more about the event, how to request your invitation, sponsorships, and more, please visit the AI Publisher Response page.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
| Session Title | Session Description |
|---|---|
| It’s Time Publishers Take Action | Publishers are being picked off one by one—negotiating individually, adopting vendor solutions in isolation, and losing leverage in the process. Today we work on coordinated responses, shared frameworks, and using collective voices to shape AI’s role in publishing rather than being shaped by it. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech |
| Morning Keynote: Someone Else Is Deciding What You Publish | Jacob Ward has spent 20 years tracking the hidden forces that shape what we think, what we buy, and who we become. In this fireside conversation with Rob Beeler, Ward turns that lens on publishing: the AI systems now deciding what gets surfaced, what gets read, and what counts as authoritative didn’t consult the people who built this industry. Ward calls what’s happening a convergence – research shows that every major AI model, fed the same prompts over and over, narrows toward the same output. Different language, identical soul. Publishers are the last institution with both the motive and the standing to fight it. The question isn’t whether publishers can compete with AI. The question is whether they can reclaim the right to set the terms — and defend the plurality of human thought before the window closes. Jacob Ward, Technology Journalist & Author |
| BREAKOUTS (FIRST ROUND) | |
| Revenue Predictability in an Unpredictable Marketplace | Publishers can’t invest or grow if they think too much in the short term, but it’s hard to build a business when things are too volatile. Let’s find a way to navigate these waters. Tom Triscari, Sr. Advisor, Landmark Ventures |
| Creating Content Without Losing Your Soul | Jacob Ward just made the case for why publishers need to fight. This session is where you bring the harder question back to him: how? The economics are real. Content that took months to report now competes on search with content that took seconds to generate. Advertisers often can’t tell the difference. Readers sometimes can’t either. So what is the actual value of expertise, judgment, and time — and how do you build a business that gets paid for it? This is a smaller room, audience-driven conversation. Bring your specific situation. Ward brings 20 years of watching institutions navigate exactly this kind of disruption. Jacob Ward, Technology Journalist & Author |
| Your Content Has Value. Do You Know What It Is? | The LLMs know exactly which of your articles are being used, which questions they’re answering, and how your content stacks up against your competitors. You don’t. That asymmetry is the problem. Ozone has spent the last year instrumenting the publisher-to-LLM workflow — scraping, embedding, vector databases, retrieval, citation — and building a research platform that lets publishers actually measure how their content performs in an AI-driven world. How often does it get cited? For what questions? Against which peers? What makes one article more valuable to an LLM than another? This session presents Ozone’s early findings and poses the harder question: if value lives in the questions being asked, not the content itself, what does that mean for how publishers think about what they create, how they structure it, and what leverage they actually have in a world where LLMs are the new front page. Charlotte Seagers, Director of Customer Success, Ozone Scott Switzer, CTO, Ozone |
| Encoding Your Business Logic: AI That Does What You Actually Need | Everyone has a directive to use AI. Almost nobody has requirements. That gap is where most publisher AI projects go to die — not because the tools don’t work, but because nobody did the harder job first: defining what you actually need the output to look like. This session is about that job. What it means to move from “use AI” to anomaly detection that knows your business logic, campaign insights that reflect how your team actually thinks, and accountability that stays where it belongs. The practical difference between having AI in your stack and making AI work for your business. |
| BREAKOUTS (SECOND ROUND) | |
| Why AI Is Hard to Fix After the Fact | AI governance failures become operational and financial loss, not just compliance issues. Model retraining costs when issues are found post-deployment. Training data and architecture decisions compound over time. Proactive governance requires data sourcing documentation, technical safeguards, and lifecycle controls. Daniel Rosenzweig, Founder & Principal Attorney, DBR Tech Law |
| Building an AI-Enabled Editorial Operation Without Crossing the Line | Christine DiGangi runs AI operations for one of the largest digital publishers in the world. Her mandate is to make People Inc. faster, smarter, and more efficient — without crossing the line they’ve drawn. In this session she walks through what it actually looks like to build an AI-enabled editorial operation that holds that line: where AI earns its place in the workflow, where it doesn’t, and what happens when teams push back. Not a framework. A live case study from someone doing it right now, at scale, under pressure — with a clear answer to the question every publisher in the room is quietly asking: how do you actually get this right? Christine DiGangi, VP, AI Operations, People Inc. |
| Content-Focused Marketplaces | The frameworks for paying publishers for their content and IP are no longer theoretical — they exist. Licensing agreements are being signed, models are being structured, and publishers who understand what they have and what it’s worth are at the table. This session maps where the market actually is: what deals look like, how they get structured, and what publishers need to know before they negotiate one. Anthony W. Katsur, Chief Executive Officer, IAB Tech Labs Emma O’Brian, General Manager, Factiva |
| Rewiring Advertising From Top to Bottom | We didn’t fix advertising. We just made it faster. AI gives publishers and the industry a rare second chance — not to optimize the broken model, but to replace it with something that actually works for everyone at the table. This session is about what that looks like and how you start. Anne Coghlan, Co-Founder & COO, Scope3 |
| The Revenue You Haven’t Found Yet | The question isn’t whether your existing revenue streams are under pressure. They are. The question is what you’re leaving on the table — and there’s more than you think. Grant Whitmore has been using AI at Advance Local to attack both sides of that problem: recovering value locked in the archive and surfacing it in new formats, and building revenue programs that simply weren’t viable before the tools existed to run them. This session covers the full range of what AI makes findable — from content produced years ago to audiences you never thought to reach to models you couldn’t have built without it. Grant Whitmore, SVP, Ad Technology & Programmatic Revenue, Advanced Local |
| Afternoon Keynote: 11 Specific Actions Publishers Should Be Taking Right Now | John Shehata’s view on AI: that’s not a threat, it’s a reset. Publishers who own their audiences, produce content machines can’t replicate, and build revenue models beyond the programmatic hamster wheel are better positioned now than they were two years ago. In this session he walks through 11 specific moves – from optimizing for AI citation to building direct audience relationships to negotiating platform terms from a position of strength. Not a diagnosis. A playbook, from someone who built audience development strategy for 16 Condé Nast brands and has been running the numbers on what’s working in the AI era. John Shehata, CEO, Founder, NewzDash |
| LUNCH | |
| Afternoon Keynote: The Human Cost of Telling the Truth | Every headline represents a human being who chose to report, document, and speak — often under extraordinary risk. As publishers debate technology, revenue models, and AI’s impact on content, it’s easy to forget that the real cost of journalism is paid by people on the ground. Jodie Ginsberg shares what the Committee to Protect Journalists sees firsthand, grounding our industry’s future in the human experience that journalism exists to protect. Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Committee to Protect Journalists |
| BREAKOUTS (THIRD ROUND) | |
| The Influence of Influencers | People like other people more than they do brands. So why aren’t enough publishers leading with their people and adapting to the influencer-led content trends? |
| To Block or Not to Block the Bots | Everyone is talking about blocking LLMs. Lindsay Van Kirk has actually done it. In this session she walks through People Inc.’s real-world experience — what worked with Cloudflare, what broke, and what the data actually showed about revenue and sessions when the blocking went live. Battle-tested operational knowledge with concrete guidance on what to watch for, what to measure, and where publishers consistently go wrong. Lindsay Van Kirk, SVP, Innovation, People Inc. |
| Trust in Human-Created Content | Trusting what we are seeing in the digital world will only become more difficult. How is this an opportunity for publishers to become the source people seek out? Susan Kantor, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Strategy, Alliance for Audited Media |
| Ad Ops Is a Good Place to Start | Your advertising operations department — both programmatic and direct sold — is a good place to start to find new efficiencies and create new opportunities. Your problem solvers are ready to work the problem. Dennis Colon, Head of Agent & Automation Strategy, boostr |
| Scraping Isn’t Just for LLMs anymore | Consumers and companies aren’t just looking to the large LLMs to collect the information they need. New tools means new interactions with our content. Opportunity or another way our work will be undervalued? |
| BREAKOUTS (FOURTH ROUND) | |
| Publisher KPIs of the Future | The metrics publishers have managed to for 20 years were built for a different era. AI is making some of them meaningless and creating new ones nobody has standardized yet. This session brings senior publishing leaders into a frank conversation about what they’re actually measuring now, what they wish they were measuring, and what the KPIs of a healthy AI-era publisher business actually look like. |
| Reaching the Community | Publishers must come much closer to their consumers to survive. How, then, does one create community at a scale that makes business sense? |
| The AI-Native Publisher: What Does It Actually Look Like? | Not aspirational. Operational. What does a publisher organization built for the AI era actually look like — staffing, tools, revenue mix, content strategy? A few practitioners who’ve made real structural changes compare notes on what they’ve actually rebuilt, what they let go, and what surprised them. |
| Closing Keynote: The Truth Shall Set You Free: Leveraging Publishing for Profitability in the Age of AI | Publishers spent decades in the information era: winning by having the most. Then the algorithm era: winning by reaching the most. AI has made both of those games unwinnable. Ovetta Sampson closes the day arguing that the only ground left worth standing on is truth: not as a mission statement, but as a genuine business model. Ovetta Sampson, Founder, Right AI |
| Will This Event Exist Next Year? | If our goal is to rally publishers to take control of their destinies, will enough forward progress happen between now and next year for the conversations to continue? Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech |