TECH DAY 2023: Hottest trends in sunny Rome

Even though the media intelligence industry changes on a yearly basis, these past several months have brought several radical innovations. With language models becoming more persuasive, the industry faces a series of challenges. That is why after incorporating Tech Day into the Spring Summit in 2022, this year, FIBEP organized a separate event in Rome, Italy. As the CEO of Global News Group, Carlos Alfredo Diaz, said, the goal was to spark a discussion among experts from around the globe and come up with new approaches.

Carlos Diaz, GlobalNews Group and FIBEP Vice President

"Being a niche industry has ups and downs, but one of the constant realities of it is that there tends to be very little in the state of the art of technology regarding our specific needs as an industry. This yearly event fills that gap by bringing together innovators in the industry with curious minds."

Diaz thought that the biggest challenge for our industry is integrating available technology appropriately since we are still years behind the most current trends in many disciplines that we use: "Unless we become better at adapting them to our needs, we risk being obliterated by someone new who can do it," he said.

That is also what FIBEP achieved in Rome – the participants shared experience in adapting the current tools to their needs. For instance, Michal Hroneš from NEWTON Media talked about the potential use of ChatGPT in the summarization of broadcast transcripts – a task he had been testing in the past weeks. His team found the technology very helpful, with occasional hiccups when the language model incorporated false information due to its inability to differentiate between past and future tenses in selected Slavic languages. He discussed the journey in detail during his presentation, along with other speakers who chose ChatGPT for their presentation this year. 

According to Diaz, a big takeaway of ChatGPT is how great it has been at setting outlandish expectations for AI as a whole. "It is the "in" topic right now, but we managed to look into related technologies that have a profound impact in our industry as opposed to simply proofs of concept." Personally, he was the most satisfied with a historically first FIBEP "hands-on" technical experience, showing how to get some code up and running: "I am very excited we planned an event not only designed for the business side but also for the technical leads in the industry," he added.

Even though such practical demonstrations could have been discouraging to some technically less savvy members, the event ended up being a success since it was not only about implementing tech but also about seeing available solutions and what other people accomplished this past year. As Carlos Alfredo Diaz concluded: "Even if you did not understand the HOW, you certainly understood the end result and how it could impact your business in the future!"