According to the Reuters Institute‘s latest Digital News Report, 10 percent of the more than 90,000 respondents surveyed globally use AI chatbots for news on a weekly basis, with the uptake significantly higher among younger people and heavy news consumer, i.e. those that access news 10+ times a day. But how do people who use AI chatbots for news consumption actually use these increasingly popular tools?
The most common use case, named by 42 percent of AI news consumers, is to ask a follow-up question about a news story, be it to better understand or to get additional context. 35 percent of users asked chatbots to give them the latest news, which is arguably more threatening to publishers, as these users likely use AI tools, not publisher websites, as their entry point for news consumption. This also explains why some publishers have started to optimize content for visibility in AI chatbots, as clickthrough from AI conversations can at least partially replace the traffic that is no longer coming from search engines.
Other news-related use cases of AI aim to simplify news consumption – summarizing stories, helping users understand them or turning text into audio/video – or to provide more information on news sources and the news media in general. Overall, the results highlight the many ways AI can be and are already used by news consumers, though they also show that there’s no true killer application with respect to news consumption yet.
