Olle Zacharison: How BBC News is Shaping its AI Strategy for the Next Era of Journalism

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Nov 15, 2025

Olle Zacharison, Head of News AI at BBC News and former Head of AI at Swedish Radio, shares insights on integrating AI in a global newsroom. He unveils the BBC's four-part AI strategy, focusing on productivity boosts and content reformatting. Olle discusses the challenges of applying AI across 42 languages and the importance of collaboration among teams. He highlights innovative use of synthetic voices for personalized news and stresses maintaining editorial integrity in an AI-driven landscape. Olle also emphasizes the BBC's role as a trusted source amidst misinformation.

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INSIGHT

Four Strategic AI Themes

BBC organizes AI work around four clear themes: productivity, reformatting, augmenting journalism, and innovating user experiences.
This thematic approach helps connect projects, set priorities, and align editorial, product, and tech teams.

INSIGHT

Low-Hanging Productivity Wins

AI use cases like transcription, tagging, alt text and translation deliver immediate productivity wins in large newsrooms.
These capabilities make content searchable, accessible, and easier to reformat across platforms.

ANECDOTE

From Article To Synthetic Club Podcast

BBC used AI to convert daily club articles into two-minute synthetic-voice sports podcasts that run for specific football clubs.
The team checks generated scripts before publishing to ensure quality and alignment.

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How do you bring AI into a newsroom as big and globally distributed as the BBC, an editorial network that stretches across 42 languages and more than 5,000 journalists?

This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy talks to Olle Zachrison, Head of News AI at BBC News, where he leads the BBC’s efforts to advance AI use and strengthen its journalism and audience experiences. Previously, the Head of AI at Swedish Radio, Olle has spent the past few years implementing practical newsroom AI workflows while upholding public-service values.

In our conversation, Olle breaks down BBC’s four-part AI strategy, covering large-scale translation and transcription, content reformatting, investigative tools, and early experiments with synthetic audio and conversational news. He shares what’s working inside one of the world’s largest news organizations, what routinely stalls AI projects, and why the most challenging part of AI transformation isn’t the technology but the collaboration required across editorial, product, and engineering. Olle also reflects on what it means to innovate as a public broadcaster in an AI-driven ecosystem, and why archives, credibility, and direct audience relationships will determine which journalism remains indispensable in the years ahead.

In this episode, we cover:

03:39 – The BBC’s four-part AI strategy: Boosting productivity, reformatting content, augmenting journalism, and innovating user experience as the core themes

05:10 – Using AI for large-scale transcription, tagging, live pages, alt text, newsletter production, and translation to save time and make content more searchable.

08:17 – Reformatting content across platforms and formats

20:59 – Innovating user experiences with synthetic audio and conversational formats

31:59 – How the BBC uses strategic themes, clear metrics, and fast pilots to decide what’s worth building and scaling

46:59 – Inside the BBC’s fine-tuned LLM and Style Assist

52:01 – What it means to be a public broadcaster in an AI-driven ecosystem

01:02:58 – Olle’s personal AI stack

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