Alessandro Alviani & Fabian Heckenberger: How Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung is building AI products that audience can trust

By 2026, most leading newsrooms have moved past the question of whether AI belongs in their organization. Now the key question is: what does a sustainable AI product strategy look like when you’re building for a subscription-based business and a high-trust brand?

This week on Newsroom Robots, host, Nikita Roy sits down with Alessandro Alviani, Lead for Generative AI, and Fabian Heckenberger, Managing Editor for AI, at Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung to discuss how they’re using AI to build the next generation of news products.

This conversation looks at what happens when AI becomes a permanent layer in a newsroom’s product stack.

Alessandro and Fabian walk through how they’re designing AI experiences that fit naturally with reader behavior and how they’re developing new distribution and accessibility formats that would have been impossible to sustain manually.

This episode also goes deep on a topic that’s becoming a defining competency which is operational trust. What do you monitor once an AI product is live? How do you categorize failures? And how do you respond quickly when something goes wrong, without panic and without eroding your brand?

This episode, we cover:

02:52 — How editorial and product roles complement each other in AI strategy

13:13 — Addressing skepticism and fear around AI in the newsroom

25:17 — Inside building the German election chatbot

31:10 — The design framework that signals AI content without eroding trust

35:30 — Real-time risk management and monitoring for live AI tools

48:50 — The two questions every newsroom should ask before greenlighting an AI project

54:55 — Closing reflections and personal AI use

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