[News] How to get started using AI for content or language projects – David Caswell’s view

David Caswell, founder of StoryFlow and former BBC News Labs product lead, advises newsrooms to begin AI projects by funding a small, highly motivated team of “agentic” technologists who work autonomously and away from existing politics, giving them ample compute to prototype workflow‑automation pilots. He argues that money is abundant; willingness to experiment with AI agents is the real scarce resource. While early “structured journalism” (2012‑15) aimed to feed downstream LLMs, today’s models work well on plain text, shifting the need for structure toward “grounding data” that preserves factuality, traceability and monetisation. Original, deep‑sourced reporting—what he calls “societal information”—retains value, as LLMs can already synthesize publicly available documents. Translation is now largely decoupled from structure for major languages, but the long‑tail of smaller languages still benefits from improved AI models.