BD AI, BusinessDesk’s pioneering artificial intelligence journalism tool, is a finalist in the prestigious Global Media Awards.

The awards, held by the International News Media Association and date back to 1937, have added artificial intelligence (AI) as a category this year.

Competing with entrants from across the globe, our Faster, Better, More: AI-Powered Markets Coverage entry was selected as a finalist in the Best Use of AI in Customer-Facing Products category.

The people

The AI tool was born out of an idea had by BusinessDesk's then publisher, Matt Martel, and the project was led by BusinessDesk's data product manager Andy Fyers, who co-developed the tool with Turkey-based development house PlusClouds.

Martel, now NZME’s managing editor for audience and platform, said the tool was tested thoroughly before its launch.

“We knew there was a good opportunity here, but we ran the tool internally for three months before taking it live. On launch day we went through our archive of NZX [New Zealand stock exchange] announcements to write more than 1,500 articles. It was incredible to see.

“BusinessDesk prides itself on the quality of our journalism, and our use of AI for these market reports frees our reporters to focus on exclusive news and investigations that have helped propel us to be New Zealand’s biggest business news provider.”

Bidi

BD AI, affectionately known as Bidi, can take on a workload that would be unsustainable for almost any news media outlet.

Underpinned by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bidi summarises each announcement to the NZX as it is posted, cutting through the noise to highlight only the most salient points.

What would take a human journalist 30 minutes takes Bidi 30 seconds.

It also generates a concise headline for the summary and appends a stock ticker for the company making the announcement.

The awards application explains the rationale behind the decision to create the tool.

“BusinessDesk had two reporters each day rostered to cover breaking news, such as market announcements. Not long after the launch of the AI tool, we were able to reduce this to one person. This achieved our goal of getting journalists to do journalism, rather than churning press releases.”

A convert

BusinessDesk managing editor Pattrick Smellie said that when Martel and Fyers began the work, he "thought quietly and wrongly it was a distraction".

"I can now see that the use of AI offers a huge opportunity for journalism."

However, the Bidi tool was only the first step in BusinessDesk's engagement with the potential of AI.

“In my view, its potential lies not only in this early demonstration that it can provide bare-bones coverage while freeing journalists up for higher value work.

"It will also help us to sift enormous amounts of evidence and source material to create better, deeper coverage"

In the last few weeks, BusinessDesk experimented with an AI "angle-finder", also developed by Fyers, to help distil the essence of the briefings to incoming ministers that are released at the start of every new NZ government.

"The potential is mind-blowing," Smellie said.

The NZ Herald, owned by BusinessDesk parent NZME, was also nominated for Best Brand Awareness Campaign, Best Idea to Grow Advertising Sales, and Best Use of Print for its Cyclone Gabrielle: Special Free Edition.