The Independent says AI-equipped editors are six times more productive
The publisher says the measure is about the value of journalists’ work, while human editors retain control over summaries and publication, and journalists decide whether to use archive material.
The Independent says editors using its full suite of in-house AI tools are six times more economically productive than colleagues who do not use them, a measure the publisher says reflects the value of their output rather than a sixfold increase in the number of articles produced.
Christian Broughton, the company’s chief executive, said the tools are intended to make journalists more effective and deepen their work, rather than cut newsroom costs. The publisher has put controls around the information its systems can draw upon, and retains human editorial oversight.
Its AI experiments began in earnest in early 2025 with Bulletin, a separate website and app that turns Independent articles into short, AI-generated briefings. The service uses Google’s Gemini to rewrite stories into five to 10 bullet points, with the human editor who handled the original article also editing its Bulletin version. The summary is attributed to the original journalist.
Bulletin was conceived as a testing ground for tools that could later be used more widely at The Independent. Journalists review and sign off its output before publication, while the briefings link readers to the publisher’s full articles, podcasts, newsletters and documentaries.
The service concentrates on complex topics that readers may want to understand quickly, rather than celebrity coverage or long-form features. The Independent created seven jobs specifically for Bulletin, and UK editor Chloe Hubbard said it generated one million article views in a single day during one reported week. Some Bulletin versions also outperformed the original articles in Google Search and Google Discover, according to earlier Press Gazette reporting.
The company has expanded the work beyond article summaries by vectorising its 40-year archive. That process converts articles and images into data searchable by meaning, rather than only by keywords, and led to an internal agent designed to act as an institutional-memory repository.
The agent can surface relevant previous Independent coverage and context while a journalist is preparing a story. Journalists decide whether to use the material, but Broughton said the system can help them produce richer reporting while working at the pace of breaking news.
AI is also used for technical production work, including story tags and search-engine-optimisation metadata. Broughton said automating those tasks had released resources for long-form investigations, including the podcast investigation “SAS: The Shadow War.”
In its 2025 financial results, The Independent reported that AI accounted for 7% of its £55 million annual revenue, or nearly £4 million. Broughton told Press Gazette that AI revenue had risen beyond that level in 2026.
The Independent had 220 journalists globally when Broughton described the programme, after building tools following a staff hack day held with Google. He said the publisher owns the agents and tools it developed, which can operate with different large language models. The company went fully digital in 2016 after 30 years in print and now publishes in six languages.