By Alicia Perez - The Associated Press announced plans on Monday to automate quarterly earnings stories starting in July, a move the nonprofit news agency said will allow its reporters to refocus their efforts on the content quality.
The automation technology is called Automated Insights according to a blog post by the agency. AP aims to increase its 300 manually written business news reports to over 4,000 with the automated system. The aim of this move is to allow AP reporters to “spend more time on things like beat reporting and source development while increasing, by a factor of more than 10, the volume of earnings reports for customers.”
No AP employees will be laid off as a result of the change, says Managing Editor Lou Ferrara. Instead, AP reports will focus on “what the numbers mean… identifying trends and finding exclusive stories we can publish at the time of the earnings reports.”
This isn’t the first time the AP has made this move. Many of the sports stories have been produced automatically for several years, Ferrara explained. For example, an automated NFL ranking was introduced last year, which “included automated text descriptions of player performances each week, which were produced by Automated Insights.”
Human eyes will continue to review the reports before they are published on the AP news wire, but Ferrara said once any bugs and concerns are out of the way, the news agency will “keep moving ahead.”