Following the recent CEO Roundtable, I’d like to share some observations with you so that you, too, can get a sense of what leaders in the industry from all over the world are thinking and saying when they are among their peers.

Their intentions will have implications for newsroom staffing, content strategy, and AI adoption in 2027.

In addition to what CEOs are investing and stepping away from, what else are they worrying about? The rise of vibe coding and agents in newsrooms and on development teams, and the challenges of creating liquid content.

How does one put in place guardrails while ensuring bureaucracy doesn’t stifle innovation and the human in the loop doesn’t become a bottleneck? What sort of structures and workflows work best in this situation?

One CEO pointed out that most content management systems were designed for a pre-agentic era. 

“You have to choose what you’re about to write or what video you’re going to make or what long-form piece before you can even enter the code for that particular entity in your CMS. That means that is the antithesis of liquid content,” they said.

“We are locking in a format. Based on how we’re currently producing, we’re going to have to move very quickly to the next generation of content management system to do any liquid content. We’ve got the wrong tech in our CMS.” 

Another CEO spoke of a cross-functional team, comprising a designer, a developer, and a couple of journalists who are “completely reimagining the operating system for the newsroom.”

“It’s been amazing how they have been able to just build and do stuff really fast by thinking about it in a completely different way, and build things that we thought previously we would have had to buy,” the CEO said. 

“Instead of having the traditional product workflow, they’ve just taken this approach of: ‘We’ll get together, we’ll come up with an idea, we’ll get agents to come up with the proposal of how we would tackle it, we’ll critique what the agents do, then we’ll set the agents to work on it and then come back.’

“But ... they’re finding their limit is that the agents are doing so much work that it’s really hard to keep up with all of the work that’s being done.”

Another attendee said: “What’s the one thing I want to come away with? It’s exactly this: How team structures, tasks, workflows are being shuffled around because of AI. This is where we need some serious help.”

Many of the people in the room voiced similar concerns.

“What we’re trying to do now is work on governance before anything else right now and get some clarity on roles and get alignment. We have the product team, the editorial team, the digital media team, the commercial team. Who owns what? Where does the decision-making process go through?”

One CEO’s answer to the question is to create the role of a chief product and technology officer, who has accountability for and visibility into all software development, and an AI team that works with heads of various business units and discusses what they are working on, particularly transferable applications.

Another CEO spoke of creating “a really powerful executive editor” who works closely with their chief transformation officer. “There’s some oversight. It’s not just a thousand flowers blooming everywhere — it’s quite supervised.”

Another CEO said they had created a separate, parallel team, away from their core technical team, to focus on hardening what has been vibe coded.

Another pointed out that the org structure is constantly changing. “I think you cannot establish a structure that will hold for 10 years. I think you must be so flexible that every quarter, every half year, you have to reassign people and tasks to various elastic teams.

“As people are using AI tools to do the jobs of other people, it’s good because we’re going faster, but it is a little bit of bedlam right now.”

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Banner image: Adobe stock image by Sukon.

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