One artificial intelligence system is on the cutting edge of automation and predictive analytics for news companies. Canada’s Sophi is transforming how publishers digitally curate content. Built over the last 10 years, in the newsroom of one of North America’s leading newspapers, The Globe and Mail, Sophi is a platform that provides automation, optimization, and predictive analytics. In 2019, Sophio.io launched to help solve problems for other publishers and in 2020, the award-winning platform began a partnership with Stibo DX to develop native integration with the CUE solution.
Stibo DX entered a partnership with Sophi based on its established success with automatic curation. “The ability to combine human curated and automatically curated blocks from within the CMS is a truly great integration,” says Stibo DX UX Design Lead, Mads Jørgensen.
"Our goal is to support great journalism. We want to make sure great stories are told and are told well. And we want to make it not just sustainable, but turn that into an engine for growth,” says Sophi Vice President Gordon Edall.
“Sophi site automation isn't a path to clickbait hell. You can be the kind of a newspaper you want to be. What Sophi is going to be able to do is help you unlock the value of your best content,”
Gordon Edall
Vice President, Sophi
Edall takes pride in Sophi’s intuitiveness, explaining at Stibo DX’s yearly user conference, CUE Days 2021, that it was built in a newsroom, for a newsroom. He says the system is smart enough to curate and predict content that it knows will benefit the publisher. Plus, it won’t compromise the integrity of the publishers’ brand.
“Sophi site automation isn't a path to clickbait hell. You can be the kind of a newspaper you want to be. What Sophi is going to be able to do is help you unlock the value of your best content,” Edall says.
The platform can reprogram every promotion slot on every page of a publisher’s website every 10 minutes, making millions of promotion decisions every month, more than employees could do on their own.
Sophi also works to ensure that each publisher has a unique experience with the AI based on the publisher’s business needs and goals. Sophi created a custom score that reflects the business outcomes that matter to each customer.
Edall says, “Whether you're an ad-supported growth business, a niche subscription publication, or a market leader that needs to balance the tension between advertising revenue and reader-pay revenue, we take a close look at the things that matter to you.”
For native site integration for the CUE Content Store, that starts in the onboarding phase. Sophi can see all of a publisher’s stories and know what it has to curate and optimize. The Sophi team works with newsrooms to set up rules so that the AI can make decisions that journalists would make in the newsroom. “Our goal is actually for it to be hard for your editors and writers to tell the difference between a Sophi curated page and a page curated by your editors.”
Sophi’s goal is to drive real business transformation by reducing the time and resources to analyze and curate, so that publishers can focus on producing quality journalism.