At NowThis, we don't have a big engineering team. So I built AI tools myself to solve the problems our newsroom actually has. In 5 minutes, I'll walk through three internal tools I shipped:- A synthetic audience panel: AI-generated Gen Z personas that simulate focus group feedback on content before we publish, helping us catch tone and framing issues early.- An AI ad ops assistant: a Slack bot that manages paid campaigns across Meta and TikTok, pulls real-time analytics from API and data warehouse, and saves our team hours of manual reporting.- An AI pilot tool: lets our team generate AI-powered pre-pilots to visualize new show concepts before committing resources I'll share what actually worked, what flopped, and the practical lessons for any lean media team thinking about building (not buying) AI tools. No massive budget required.
