Human-powered information in the age of AI

We think of this as the third era of media and information company building since Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. And it’s one that can be a golden era for owners and operators who can get in front of it. Mediocre media and information companies will struggle in the age of AI. But great ones will thrive.

1. I

   Distribution Era. Media and information companies were inherently dominant when they owned distribution. Presses, trucks and newsstands were scarce, so whoever owned the infrastructure to distribute information owned the audience. These economies of scale created impressively profitable businesses.

2. II

   Search and Social Era. Then search and social media dismantled that model and information companies had to stand up technical infrastructure to build audiences online. Platforms became the front door, and media rented the reach it used to own. Information companies hired product, engineering and growth teams to interact with machines, and margins fell.

3. III

   Human-Powered Information Era. Now it’s AI’s turn to dismantle the model of the last thirty years further. But what if those same companies didn’t have to hire teams of product, engineering and growth people to compete? What if they could focus on the areas they prided themselves on: trust, reliability and high-quality content generation?

The AI world makes generic content worthless and the software work around it cheap. Owners and executives should be asking themselves: What does it mean for all existing data and information to be cheaply and easily summarized and piped through an API?

The answer is to double down on information and data in the real world that only humans can reach. We call this human-to-human information networks. What an executive tells a reporter he trusts. What a buyer tells a seller she has known for ten years. None of it is online until someone goes and gets it. This is the mandate of the modern media and information company.

How this plays out

• Editorial and sales are the core jobs again — and superpowered with AI. Both functions are focused on people getting information from people. Both get more valuable as everything else gets cheaper. AI helps editors edit faster. The value of sales in industries where a handshake deal still matters will soar. And those who embrace these new superpowers can be more impactful than ever.
• AI takes over much of the work where the value was humans interacting with machines. The generation of roles created to tech-ify information companies will sunset. Humans writing SEO will seem like the horse buggy drivers of our previous era.

What ultimately matters in this era: trust, credibility and an alignment system centered around human networks and interactions. This new structure of company building is more nimble, puts people where people matter, and lets AI run the rest. We think it can earn strong margins over long periods of time.

Think about it like this: if the AI machine becomes a factory for extracting value out of information, there will be immense value in being the connection point between human-to-human information networks and everyone’s AI machine. That’s where we want to be.

Examples

• Think of a marine intelligence company with proprietary relationships with port officials around the world.
• Or a niche data business with a proprietary network of importers who provide reams of unstructured import data through long-standing relationships.
• Or a hosted buyer event that brings together diverse networks of producers and equipment manufacturers in a specialized manufacturing vertical.

In many ways this mashup of data, information and journalism was our approach at LongHold with Meatingplace: superserve our customers with the highest quality information in the market, premium analysis of the industry with bespoke newsletters and now proprietary data and insights.

This is one of our core theses at LongHold: Powering humans to source and create the information only they can do. In this new era, human-to-human information networks will be as scarce and valuable as ever.