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It’s now over a decade since publishing empire News Corp and Fox went their separate ways, for good reason. As Lachlan Murdoch, Chair of the former, pitches it, the goal was enable “building a digital-first news and information services powerhouse”. Flash forward to today, and the business is well positioned to meet “the AI moment”, he argues.
Part of the reason for this self-confidence (although familial genetics must surely play a large part!) can be found in the shape of the Dow Jones & Co, acquired for $5 billion by News Corp back in 2007. This, argues CEO Almar Latour, is the true data and business intelligence powerhouse.
Today, Dow Jones is organized into three units - news (divided into consumer and enterprise, and incorporating The Wall Street Journal); risk; and energy. Lisa Fitzpatrick, Dow Jones General Manager of Industries, breaks down the various Dow Jones data offerings that clients can access:
The Wall Street Journal, combined with other Dow Jones news coverage and practitioner commentary, gives professionals insights and context they need. Dow Jones Newswires capture real-time developments that are powering professional trading and investing decisions. And our Factiva team provides company and market intelligence from tens of thousands of sources globally...Jointly, we call them the enterprise news business, because each of these product lines delivers news and must-have intelligence to a wide range of corporate clients
As for those clients and their needs:
They range from hyperscalers to financial institutions, large corporations, hedge funds, start-ups. They know that their AI models outputs are only as good as their inputs. Our AI models need to be updated constantly to stay relevant, and our news does just that.
AI incoming
As Latour explains it, the Dow Jones sales pitch is:
Dow Jones is built to inform the business world. It's built to inform you. We anticipate and respond to shifting needs of our clients and consumers in this era of great change, which also is an era of mis-information.
That mis-information angle inevitably opens the discussion up to AI. The rise of generative AI start-ups and the general rampaging throughout the universe of intellectual property and other people’s content that has accompanied that, is something that clearly has implications for a company like Dow Jones. But Latour sees more opportunity than negativity in the current climate:
Here comes the kicker, in the age of AI, demand for our type of reliable information has only been increasing. And we're seeing more demand, not less. For example, customers are coming back multiple times to drive their gen AI products with Dow Jones Factiva, just one example.
OK, a bold contention, but one that’s not without merit as Latour points out:
On any given day, our news, data and intelligence, convening power, they ripple through the business world. This is how we create premium value for customers, and that's what today is about, driving that value. Our news and information is essential in this age of vast change, and that's even more the case in the era of AI which, of course, is only just getting started. Indeed, we believe AI is an accelerant to our business, an accelerant for our growth.
Differentiators
In terms of differentiators and competitive moats in this gen AI age. the trust levels associated with the Dow Jones brands are key here. Latour explains:
As AI puts pressure on existing SaaS models, our trusted data and intelligence gathered by countless researchers, countless data scientists, countless reporters, our data is agnostic to which models our clients use. New tools, old tools, they will require trusted data just the same if they want to be successful, if they want to see good outcomes.
In a world that is changing so rapidly, the true power of Dow Jones is how all of our assets and our amazing teams of reporters, researchers, experts, data scientists, engineers or commercial teams, how they all play together. And the ability to offer reliable news, data, intelligence and convening power in key areas of the business world is what makes us truly indispensable and more vital in an age where reliable news and reliable data is in short supply, especially in the era of AI where your outputs are only as good as your inputs. Truly trusted information is the key value that we offer to customers.
In fact, trust is at the root of everything Dow Jones offers. As Latour frames it, this is:
Trust that our colleagues and I have to earn every day. Trust that has been built over decades...We are collectively agnostic to which tools and delivery channels are used to deploy or news data and intelligence, whether our customers use legacy systems or new AI models, they will require reliable and trusted data either way. And we believe that the need for Dow Jones, therefore will only increase.
The proprietary nature of so much of Dow Jones data is another asset/moat in the gen AI age. As Latour notes:
There's a lot of it. That news data and intelligence is gathered by thousands of reporters, researchers, analysts, data scientists in ways that simply cannot be replicated by AI models.
There is, in fact, a proprietary Dow Jones definition that Fitzpatrick promises customers can “hang their hat on” and which meets regulatory expectations:
Where global media is required for negative signals on people and companies, we have unique access to Factiva and its thousands of licensed media sources. This data is structured in an adverse media taxonomy, which is, again, unique to Dow Jones.
She adds:
Our existing and prospective corporate clients need reliable information and data for their models in order to achieve reliable outcomes. Not only do we see this as an opportunity to win new clients, but it's an opening to build deeper, more lucrative relationships with our existing customer base.
Growth opportunities
And AI is delivering growth opportunities in the corporate market even greater than before, says Fitzpatrick:
While companies are spending less on developing tools, they're spending more on targeted information they can trust. And ultimately, we are agnostic to which models and work tools our customers choose to use.
She goes on to assert that AI is enabling deeper integration across a number of categories of enterprise news products including bespoke news, custom news feeds, particularly in the financial services market, where firms are building their own internal research and trading systems that leverage Dow Jones data and AI is enabling and delivering data sets that are tailored for specific funds and strategies.
A third category of note is that of AI connectors, which bring Dow Jones products and data into LLM platforms. Fitzpatrick cites the recently launched Factiva ChatGPT connector, developed in collaboration with OpenAI, as a case in point:
Factiva's trusted licensed content is integrated for Factiva subscribers directly into the enterprise ChatGPT environment. This allows Factiva enterprise customers to leverage ChatGPT to access licensed, reliable and trusted detail and insight, all of which link insight back to our owned and operated Dow Jones Factiva platform. Customers are required to have a Factiva subscription in order to unlock its data and content on ChatGPT. And the Factiva Connector is featured in the ChatGPT App Store and serves as a funnel to Factiva itself.
Fitzpatrick also offers up an example from the real world of how all this is playing out in practice:
The first relates to our human intelligence. We had a customer trying to identify Russian connections with two separate companies. Our thorough data analysis did not yield any initial connections to Russia, but when evaluating the English translations of both passport copies of the company's CEOs, our team identified that both have been certified based on a translator stamp on the same day by the same translator based in Moscow. This highlighted a Russian connection, which the customer had not previously seen.
In another report, we had a subject where there was a blog post on an ongoing investigation. However, that post was taken down. Our proprietary archive meant we retained that information, and we were able to help our customer identify this ongoing investigation.
All of this leads Latour to one conclusion as the AI age continues to take shape:
This is our moment!
My take
So, a case of AI as enabler for growth - and most definitely not a threat to a legacy business model. As Emma Tucker, Editor-in-Chief of The Wall Street Journal puts it:
We believe you simply cannot run a high-performing LLM without our data. While AI models are trained on the past, we are reporting the present in real time.