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 Time	Session Title	Session Description
8:00am		Breakfast
9:00 AM	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
9:10 AM	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, CNN Contributor; Author of The Loop; Founder of The Rip Current; Fmr Editor in Chief of Popular Science, CNN & The Rip Current
9:50 AM	Transition Break	It’s time to head to your first breakout session of the day!
10:05 AM		BREAKOUTS (FIRST ROUND)
	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
	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. Max Kalfus, Senior Director, Revenue Operations, Condé Nast
	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, CNN Contributor; Author of The Loop; Founder of The Rip Current; Fmr Editor in Chief of Popular Science, CNN & The Rip Current
10:50 AM	Networking Break	Grab a coffee and a snack, chat with new friends, and then make your way to your next session.
11:15 AM		BREAKOUTS (SECOND ROUND)
	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, Advance Local
	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: make People Inc. faster, smarter, and more efficient — without crossing the line they’ve drawn. “We will never publish something written by a machine.” In this session she walks through how you actually 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. Christine DiGangi, VP, AI Operations, People Inc.
	Building the Publisher Stack in the Age of AI	In the age of AI, Publishers need to be prepared for Agentic Advertising transactions and LLMs scraping their properties. This session unpacks the IAB Tech Lab’s AI and Agentic Roadmap, including AAMP, CoMP, and ARTF, and outlines the steps Publishers should take to protect the value of their content from non-human traffic and to prepare for a future of Agentic transactions with a robust Agentic framework based on existing standards that can turn experimentation into durable, scalable intelligence. Anthony W. Katsur, Chief Executive Officer, IAB Tech Lab
	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 B. Rosenzweig, Founder & Principal Attorney, DBR Tech Law
12:00 PM	Transition	Join us back in the main room for AI insights.
12:10 PM	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
12:50 PM	It’s Lunch Time!	After a full morning of collaborating and learning, let’s eat! Before we dig into the rest of our day together.
1:50 PM	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
2:30 PM	Transition	It’s time for a big afternoon of learning, so head to your next breakout session.
2:40 PM		BREAKOUTS (THIRD ROUND)
	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 Rachael Savage, SVP Revenue Ops, Hearst Magazine
	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
	Following the Value: Why Enterprise Workflows Are the Real Path to Publisher Compensation	Publishers have spent two years demanding payment from AI labs. The labs price on tokens, not trust, and the demand isn’t coming. Quiet Instruments is building in a different place: the enterprise AI workflows where publisher content actually influences high-stakes decisions. If McKinsey is using AI to run due diligence and your reporting shapes the output, that’s where the value is — and that’s where the attribution layer needs to live. This session maps the case for following the value to where it lands. Itay Tamary, Founder, Quiet Instruments Jay Glogovsky, Advisor, Quiet Instruments
	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 Deepica Capoor Warikoo, Associate General Counsel, Haymarket Media, Inc.
3:25 PM	Networking Break	We’re almost through the day! Take a moment to connect with your peers, quickly check your emails, and then prepare to end the day strong.
3:45 PM		BREAKOUTS (FOURTH ROUND)
	AI Opportunity Is Everywhere in Your Organization. Are You Moving Fast Enough?	The publishers who benefit most from AI won’t be the ones with the best strategy documents. They’ll be the ones who moved first. Kelly Facer started with a single prompt eight weeks ago and ended up with five new revenue programs, an editorial operation producing more page views with fewer articles, and the highest page views her organization had seen in over two years. The lesson isn’t that AI does all the work. It’s that the opportunity is everywhere — in revenue, in editorial, in operations — and the window for first-mover advantage is closing faster than most publishers are moving. This session is about how to see it and how to act. Kelly Facer, SVP, Sightline Media Group and Sunset Hugh Garvey, Editor-in-Chief, Sunset
	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 from one of the largest digital publishers. Lindsay Van Kirk, SVP, Innovation, People Inc. Matthew Landolf, Senior Director, Cloud Infrastructure, People Inc.
	No More Waiting and Wishing	Time is up. We must act. Let’s identify where to work collectively to make sure that creating human-generated content is a sustainable business. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
	Does AI Bring Brands and Publishers Together?	Publishers and brands are having the same conversation in separate rooms. Both are watching AI upend their businesses. The assumption that their interests are opposed may be what hurts them both most. Cecilia Dones and Michael Cohen compare notes: what are brands actually doing with AI in their media and creative processes, what do publishers need to understand about how buying decisions are being made, and is there a version where both sides stop getting played by the platforms? Dr. Cecilia Dones, Consultant Michael A. Cohen, Partner, Bain & Company
4:30 PM	Transition	The day is almost done, folks. Time to head to our final sessions of the day, where we’ll bring everything together.
4:40 PM	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
5:20 PM	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