This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy is joined by Tav Klitgaard, the CEO of the Danish newsroom Zetland, to unpack the origin story of GoodTape — an AI transcription tool that began as an internal newsroom solution and evolved into a profitable, global product used far beyond journalism.

Zetland is an audio-first newsroom in Denmark. But GoodTape wasn’t born from an AI strategy or a product roadmap. It emerged from a familiar newsroom pain point of journalists spending hours transcribing interviews, with existing tools falling short, especially in non-English languages like Danish.

In this conversation, Tav breaks down how GoodTape went from an internal experiment to a standalone, subscription-based product that quickly became profitable, generated millions in revenue and was eventually divested. He also shares what building GoodTape taught Zetland about AI adoption, organizational learning, and where newsrooms should, and shouldn’t, use generative AI.

This episode covers:

05:50 – How a prototype using OpenAI’s Whisper sparked GoodTape

08:36 – The moment Zetland realized GoodTape could be a real product

12:34 – How journalism’s trust and privacy standards became a product advantage

13:59 – What actually improves transcription quality beyond the model itself

15:27 – How GoodTape became profitable and contributed to Zetland’s revenue

16:29 – Why Zetland eventually divested GoodTape instead of scaling it internally

17:36 – What building an AI product taught Zetland about newsroom AI adoption

19:08 – Why Zetland uses AI for productivity, not editorial output

28:14 – A real-world example of AI use that forced Zetland to rethink its own guidelines

30:34 – Why principles matter more than rigid AI rules in newsrooms

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Tav Klitgaard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

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How do you redesign a newsroom’s entire workflow when AI is no longer a single tool, but a collection of agents, voice interfaces, and ambient intelligence changing how journalism gets produced?

This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy is joined by Markus Franz, Chief Technology Officer at Ippen Digital, one of Germany’s largest digital media networks with more than 80 online news and media portals. This episode was recorded live at the Digital Growth Summit in Stuttgart, where Markus shared how his team is building some of the most forward-looking AI experiments in European media.

Markus leads Ippen Digital’s Incubator Lab, an innovation unit focused on reimagining how publishing and AI-driven experiences will evolve. With 16 years inside the company, Markus has been central to Ippen’s digital transformation and now leads efforts around multi-agent architectures and building adaptive workflows for the newsroom.

In this conversation, Markus breaks down how his lab is experimenting with multi-agent “virtual teams,” voice-first newsroom interfaces, multimodal content production and an ambient AI-powered newsroom where intelligent systems support journalists in real time. He shares what his team has learned from early prototypes, why the biggest challenges are cultural rather than technical, and how news organizations should think about guardrails, platform dependency, and the rise of self-evolving models.

This episode covers:

02:22 – Why Ippen Digital built an Incubator Lab and how it’s structured as a future-focused R&D unit

04:49 – What multi-agent systems look like inside a newsroom

9:42 – The case for voice as the next major interface for both journalists and audiences

14:41 – The shift from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop workflows

17:40 – Guardrails for agent systems: grounding, bounding, editorial policies

19:33 – The vision for an ambient newsroom powered by AI companions and real-time intelligence

27:31 – Why vendor lock-in and self-evolving LLMs pose new strategic risks

30:08 – Multimodal personalization and rethinking how news is experienced

34:27 – Why most AI pilots fail and what experimentation looks like in practice

49:19 – Markus’s personal AI stack and how he uses these tools day-to-day

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How do you bring AI into a newsroom as big and globally distributed as the BBC, an editorial network that stretches across 42 languages and more than 5,000 journalists?

This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy talks to Olle Zachrison, Head of News AI at BBC News, where he leads the BBC’s efforts to advance AI use and strengthen its journalism and audience experiences. Previously, the Head of AI at Swedish Radio, Olle has spent the past few years implementing practical newsroom AI workflows while upholding public-service values.

In this conversation, Olle breaks down BBC’s four-part AI strategy, covering large-scale translation and transcription, content reformatting, investigative tools, and early experiments with synthetic audio and conversational news. He shares what’s working inside one of the world’s largest news organizations, what routinely stalls AI projects, and why the most challenging part of AI transformation isn’t the technology but the collaboration required across editorial, product, and engineering. Olle also reflects on what it means to innovate as a public broadcaster in an AI-driven ecosystem, and why archives, credibility, and direct audience relationships will determine which journalism remains indispensable in the years ahead.

This episode covers:

03:39 – The BBC’s four-part AI strategy: Boosting productivity, reformatting content, augmenting journalism, and innovating user experience as the core themes

05:10 – Using AI for large-scale transcription, tagging, live pages, alt text, newsletter production, and translation to save time and make content more searchable.

08:17 – Reformatting content across platforms and formats

20:59 – Innovating user experiences with synthetic audio and conversational formats

31:59 – How the BBC uses strategic themes, clear metrics, and fast pilots to decide what’s worth building and scaling

46:59 – Inside the BBC’s fine-tuned LLM and Style Assist

52:01 – What it means to be a public broadcaster in an AI-driven ecosystem

01:02:58 – Olle’s personal AI stack

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