Time CEO Jessica Sibley is embracing AI even as it’s triggering a massive upheaval in the publishing industry.
For the longtime media exec, it just makes better business sense to do so.
“We want to have a seat at the table and be with these top executives,” Sibley told Yahoo Finance at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday.
“We started early in this journey, and we’ve decided to start with a guiding principle, which was are we going to negotiate, litigate, or do nothing? We decided if we were going to negotiate, we were going to opt in. We want to be part of this technology,” she explained.
Time has pressed forward with a major reinvention under Sibley, partly by leaning into AI.
In 2024, it signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI to give it access to Time’s 102-year-old content archive.
More recently, the company said it’ll launch an on-demand podcast with Meta (META)-backed Scale AI that features two AI hosts summarizing four top stories from its newsletter The Brief.
Sibley said the company has been leveraging AI across “every single department” to become more efficient, from the newsroom to legal and HR. The push for cost savings comes as Time laid off around 30 staffers in January 2024 and another 22 last August. Sibley cited industry headwinds at the time for the cuts.
In the fall, Time expects to enable multilingual, personalized AI interactions on the site, such as AI search, chat, and translation.
“The acceleration of how consumers are demanding finding ways of personalized content, multimodal content, and with the AI answer results, we wanted to again embrace it and be part of it as opposed to litigate,” Sibley said.
Time was purchased from Meredith Corporation in September 2018 by Salesforce (CRM) co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in cash. Sibley began as its CEO in November 2022, joining the magazine from Forbes, where she was COO. Prior to Forbes, she held leadership positions at Condé Nast and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
The publication has also expanded its high-profile events business and modernized its tech stack while continuing with its high-quality journalism.
To that end, Time named Donald Trump “Person of the Year” for 2024 and followed up with a headline-making interview with the president to mark his first 100 days in office.
Sibley said in a recent note that Time is forecasting 24% advertising revenue growth in the first half of the year.
Other media players are navigating the tricky balance between negotiating and litigating against AI. Big Tech has been forking over large sums of money for licensing agreements to use publishers’ archives to train large language models.
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