Sophi.io, The Globe and Mail’s AI-powered automation and optimization platform, was announced this week as a finalist in the International News Media Association (INMA)’s 2022 Global Media Awards in the category of Best Innovation in Newsroom Transformation. Partnering with Naviga, it automated print laydown for Agderposten, a regional daily newspaper that serves over 25,000 readers across Norway, and increased print efficiencies by 66%.

“Sophi’s automated machine-learning system is the biggest transformation to print media in decades,” said Gordon Edall, Co-Founder at Sophi.io. “We’re grateful that Agderposten chose to work with Naviga and us. Their commitment to improving efficiency and embracing ground-breaking technology like Naviga Publisher powered by Sophi.io should inspire the entire media industry to look forward to a future where AI and automation helps everyone.”

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Naviga Publisher powered by Sophi.io is an artificial intelligence-powered system that emulates human decisions to produce newspaper pages that look like they were created with an understanding of the news of the day as well as high journalistic standards. All editors need to do is roughly prioritize articles and hit the “Print My Newspaper” button to generate an automated print laydown, without templates, in minutes. Handing over this labour-intensive task lets newsrooms focus on their real objective of finding and telling the next important story.

“It’s hours saved for journalism,” said Agderposten’s Editor-in-Chief Katrine Lia. And the staff at Agderposten often cannot tell the difference between pages produced by Sophi and those handled by their editors.

Sophi and Naviga, a large software technology provider for the global publishing industry, have been working with Agderposten for more than a year now and successes there have paved the way to bringing dozens of new titles from several major publishing houses on board this year. Sophi provides cutting edge AI and ML technology that, along with Naviga Publisher, fully automates the end-to-end print production workflow.

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Agderposten was the first customer to use Publisher. Its print production process is now centralized, its newspaper laydown is up to 80% automated, and most impressively, Agderposten has realized a 66% reduction in time and resources – lowering the cost of producing the printed newspaper and letting journalists work on creating digital content rather than operating InDesign.

Agderposten CEO Øyvind Klausen said he expected cost savings and efficiency would continue to increase as more of Agderposten’s pages were automated and more of its newspapers implemented the print automation solution.

The Global Media Awards received 854 entries from 252 news brands in 46 countries this year. The judges consist of 50 media experts from 24 countries focused across 20 categories, including news brands, media platforms, subscriptions, advertising, data and insights, product, and newsrooms. The first place winners will be announced on June 9.