Artificial intelligence was the central theme at this year’s Indigo Trigger Lead-to-Cash Bash, permeating every discussion. Speakers from Hearst Newspapers, Data Axle, Site Impact, Minnesota Star Tribune, Cox Media Group, The Seattle Times, and more demonstrated AI’s transformative impact on sales enablement, audience targeting, political advertising compliance, and operational workflows across the media industry. The two-day event made clear that AI has evolved from an experiment into a core growth engine embedded in the business of news. The event began with Hearst Newspapers sharing how this 137-year-old publisher is modernizing its sales infrastructure around AI. In a session titled “Smarter Sales, Real Results: How AI Is Powering Change at Hearst Newspapers, ” Katerina “Kat” White, director of sales operations and enablement, and Michael McCarthy, senior director of AI, Sales & Business Solutions, revealed a comprehensive modernization drive delivering measurable improvements in onboarding speed, sales confidence, and productivity. Hearst’s AI-powered cold-call simulator, customized coaching tools, automated prep workflows, and new cross-platform integrations have unified a previously fragmented toolset into a cohesive sales-enablement hub. Adoption rates have soared, underpinned by the philosophy that “everything comes back to confidence, ” setting the tone for the entire event. AI is also supercharging audience targeting and marketing efficiency. Greg Heiman (Site Impact) and Daniel Babb (Data Axle) highlighted how email marketing, often viewed as legacy, is being revitalized into a precision channel through machine learning. Leveraging a massive dataset of 300 million consumer profiles with over 1, 000 behavioral attributes, their AI systems generate larger, more accurate, and action-ready audience segments. Babb summarized the shift succinctly: “AI isn’t just finding audiences — it’s predicting which audiences will take action. ” Case studies from travel and automotive advertisers demonstrated significant improvements in reach, open rates, and click-through performance, proving that AI-driven audience building outperforms traditional targeting approaches. Automation took center stage in “Scaling Your Team with AI Agents, ” featuring Brian Kennett (Star Tribune), Shajan Thomas (Cox Media Group), and Paul Deraval (NinjaCat). They showcased AI agents capable of generating SQL and Python code, optimizing underperforming search campaigns, and autonomously managing political-ad compliance tasks. Kennett emphasized the impact: “By leveraging agentic tools, Star Tribune will be able to do more in a month than we used to do in a year. ” Cox Media Group reported reclaiming 20% of staff time from manual keyword reviews — equivalent to one full workday per employee each week. Deraval’s live demo of “Negative Nancy, ” an agent designed to detect and fix poor Google Ads performance, energized the audience and sparked his now-famous line: “The future LinkedIn profile of top sellers will highlight the AI agents they’ve built and deployed. ” On day two, The Seattle Times and the Star Tribune dove deeper into AI copilots developed through Lenfest Institute grants.

Allyson McKinney (Seattle Times) demonstrated AI tools handling lead scoring, outbound email generation, collateral retrieval, and ADA-compliance checks. Using Scribe to document workflows has eased AI adoption by institutionalizing processes and reducing user apprehension. Kennett introduced “Virtual Brian, ” an agent trained on over 3, 500 internal documents—from client emails to training manuals—granting account executives instant subject-matter expertise. The system includes an “Is this correct?” verification feature to minimize AI errors, with Kennett cautioning, “You still need human review. Always. ” In circulation strategy, sophistication continues to grow. Aaron Kotarek from the Spokane Spokesman-Review shared how transitioning from an email-heavy reactivation approach to an SMS-focused strategy led to a 350%+ jump in reactivated subscriptions. The immediacy of SMS combined with refined segmentation and rapid optimization surpassed previous results. Meanwhile, Joshua Petersen (Anchorage Daily News CFO) and Kimberly Miller (Payway EVP) argued convincingly that payment operations are a vital reader-revenue function, not just back-office work. They emphasized that payment declines, expirations, and failed transactions represent preventable churn, and thus payment strategy must integrate seamlessly with circulation workflows. The event closed with Forum Communications and Vistar Media presenting a case study on expanding audience-extension revenue through Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) campaigns. Using Vistar’s location-level targeting and visualization tools, Forum helped an electronics client increase in-store sales by 25% and search conversions by 18% over a 90-day test period. Overall, every track—from sales and marketing to circulation and compliance—underscored one key message: AI is now indispensable infrastructure. It forms the connective tissue of next-generation media organizations by enabling faster workflows, better decision-making, higher profitability, reduced operational risk, and more confident, capable teams. Indigo Trigger’s Lead-to-Cash Bash didn’t merely showcase innovative tools but unveiled a new operational model—one where news organizations embracing AI holistically will outpace those that hesitate.