Every generation of publishing has had to absorb a new production technology and figure out, in real time, how much to trust it. Desktop publishing, digital ad serving, programmatic buying, each one promised speed, and each one compelled newsrooms and sales floors to work out where a person still needed to be in the loop. AI is the industry's current version of that same question.
Publishers don't need convincing that AI can speed up ad production. What's less settled, and far more consequential, is how much human oversight AI still needs before its output is ready to go in front of an advertiser. That's turning into one of the more interesting operating questions in the industry right now, and it's less about any one tool than about how sales and production teams redesign their workflow around it.
Get that balance wrong in either direction, and it shows up on the revenue line. Too much manual review, and AI never delivers the speed it promised. Too little, and an unsuitable ad reaches an advertiser with nobody having caught it.
There's a distinction worth sitting with here. The human layer isn't just a safety net for when AI gets something wrong. Increasingly, it looks like the thing that makes AI trustworthy enough to put in front of an advertiser in the first place.
That raises a harder question than most publishers have had to answer yet, not whether to use AI, but where exactly people need to stay in the loop, and where they don't. It's a question more about workflow and culture than about any particular tool, and it's one publishers are still very much working out.
This is exactly the territory we are exploring with Editor and Publisher, in an upcoming webinar session with two industry experts who spend their time thinking about it from the production side. Mediaferry’s Robert Berkeley and Tariq Husain bring decades of experience in helping publishers all over the world to improve their workflows.
Close More Ad Sales: How AI Helps You Create Better Ads Faster
Free Webinar — Thursday, Sept. 17, at 12:00 p.m. ET
Rather than a walkthrough of a single product, the session is framed as a discussion of where the industry is headed, how AI and human judgment are starting to work as one workflow instead of two separate steps, and what that shift means for how sales and production teams are organized.
Spec ads come up as one useful, concrete example, the familiar scenario of an advertiser who's interested but doesn't have creative ready, and the days that can pass while a studio queue catches up. It's an easy case to picture, but the panel treats it as one instance of a broader pattern rather than the whole story: the same oversight question shows up anywhere a publisher is deciding how much to automate and how much still needs a person's judgment.
The panel also plans to bring in examples from publishers already working this way, rather than keeping the conversation theoretical. It's a chance to hear what the AI-and-human combination looks like in an actual sales and production workflow, not just how it's supposed to work in principle.
What publishers are likely to take away isn't a feature list. It's a clearer way of thinking about the trade-off between speed and reliability, and a look at why the publishers getting the most out of AI right now are the ones treating human oversight as a built-in part of the process, not something bolted on after the fact.
Publishers are still early in working out how much of this to trust and how to structure teams around it. This session is a chance to hear that thinking laid out by people working through it day to day, rather than a demo built around a single tool.
The webinar is free, and seats are limited.
Register for "Close More Ad Sales: How AI Helps You Create Better Ads Faster"
