Bonnier News is Sweden’s leading news provider and one of the Nordic region’s largest media groups, boasting a team of over 2,000 journalists and a daily audience of six million. Bonnier News’ portfolio of 200 brands includes many of Sweden’s popular print, news, television, podcast, and audio outlets.

“Instead of creating a dependency on external generative AI tools, we sought to create an environment that is safe and used fewer tools – tools that are Bonnier News-certified,” says Director of Business Development at Bonnier News, Dilem Güler.

In October 2023, as part of their ongoing digital transformation, Bonnier News partnered with the Google News Initiative (GNI) to build an internal generative AI solution that could be integrated into their native content production workflow.

“We believe that AI tools should be developed internally to solve the real challenges that we have,” says Dilem. “We don't want to build spaceships, we want to do journalism.”

Bonnier News’ Brand Studio – the internal marketing agency for their own brands and external clients – developed and manages the solution, called BonsAI (Bonnier News’ AI).

BonsAI makes creating native and commercial content and images more efficient by automating some of the backend tasks, like background research and interview transcription. The goal is to improve native content quality and audience engagement with their campaigns by freeing up time for the team to focus on more strategic work.

In combination with Bonnier News’ unique expertise, creativity, and data inputs, BonsAI helps optimize ad generation and enhance the team’s campaign offerings. Testing revealed that the average CTR for ads with BonsAI-generated images was an impressive 0.65 percent, compared with a 0.55 percent CTR for stock images. In several cases, the AI images delivered an astounding 100-percent improvement in CTR over the original images.

BonsAI was developed to align with Bonnier News’ culture of democratization, where anyone in the organization can access the latest technology and tools to benefit their work. Multiple onboarding, knowledge-exchange sessions, and workshops were held to provide employees at all levels of technical expertise with training and support, with an emphasis on effective prompting techniques that allow users to get the most out of the new tool.

“We wanted to make sure that everybody can use BonsAI by designing it to be very open and accessible, and not something that feels like a threat to your profession, but rather a tool that makes you better at what you do,” says Magnus Engström, head of Architecture and Data at Bonnier News.

This inclusive approach has paid off, resulting in a high adoption rate of BonsAI among journalists and advertising teams, with 72 percent of users finding the images helpful. Somewhat surprisingly, other teams throughout the organization, such as developers, have also started using the tool to solve their own unique challenges.