LEON

From lab to newsroom: How Reuters builds AI tools journalists actually use

Reuters developed a suite of AI-powered newsroom tools with a human-in-the-loop approach: Fact Genie, an AI-assisted summarisation tool that scans entire documents in under five seconds to suggest newsworthy alerts (helping Speed teams publish the first alert within about six seconds of a press release, across roughly 100,000 business news alerts published monthly by 250-300 journalists); LEON, an AI-powered headline assistant; and AVISTA, a machine-learning tool for sourcing, tagging and archiving photos and videos. Fact Genie took about four months from prototype to production rollout, starting with senior journalists in the US and UK before expanding, and the team also uses AI to filter out non-newsworthy content before it reaches a large language model, cutting alert-generation time from about a minute with GPT-3.5 Turbo to about 10 seconds with GPT-4o mini.