Please explain what your Accelerator project is in as much detail as possible.
The primary goal of the SMART STORIES: The Agentic Production Ecosystem IBC Accelerator Incubator project is to define an open standard for story context interoperability in news production.
A newsroom’s rundown system, MAM, graphics systems and planning tools each hold fragments of the same story without a shared understanding of editorial context. MOS (Media Object Server) connected these systems operationally, but nothing connects them editorially. The present-day result is producers spending a lot of time re-entering context and correcting misunderstandings between tools, instead of really benefiting from what the tools are meant to do for them.
This Incubator’s primary goal is to tackle this challenge and give AI agents across the chain a shared understanding of what a story is, what’s happening, and what matters. This is what SOM (Story Object Model) looks to address.
Who is involved in the project?
Project Champions are: AP (Associated Press), Al Jazeera, Washington Post, BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky, EBU, NBC Universal, SMPTE, Reuters, Fonn Group, ITN, Scripps, The Global Creative & Security Community
Participants consist of: Moments Lab, Shure, EVS, CUEZ, Perspective Media Group, Google Cloud, TRINT, Cognizant, Nuvelics, AWS, Octopus, The Weather Company, HyperContent AI, LiveU, Electric Sheep.
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Why do you believe the project is important to the media industry?
Agentic technologies and workflows are becoming more commonplace within many organisations, but news production and environments such as newsrooms are very unique. There are many moving systems, operations and people in a rapidly changing situation as a news story breaks and develops. With so many variants of content being produced across multiple platforms, keeping up to date is hugely complex.
This year’s project looks at what worked well in 2025’s award-winning AI Agent Assistants for Live Production” Accelerator project, but also what could be improved. Overlaying that with a look at MOS, the established newsroom protocol, creates an exciting opportunity to see how today’s news production can be transformed without the burden and legacy of old protocols, and custom integrations between each vendor.
With many people in news production transferring data and context between many UIs, we’re asking: “How can agentic workflows enhance and assist in news story generation, whilst retaining the proper and necessary content guardrails, and still truly allow users to implement their creative approach to telling a story?” This project isn’t just a PoC to show what tech can do. It’s a real world application across multiple organisations, with many vendors that would be involved in news production, coming together to build, test and challenge how an agentic workflow could be deployed.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as part of your project?
This is quite a large-scale project, involving collaboration among many champions and vendors. We’re working with a huge amount of data, and many workflows need to be assessed, validated and mapped into a working SOM schema. All of these elements also make the project quite exciting–to say that we’re involved at the inception of a schema that could help change media production workflows in the future is very special.
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Why did you want to be part of this year’s IBC Accelerator programme?
Last year’s project proved what agentic workflows can do within a news environment. This year is about taking that further and exploring what it actually means to integrate agentic workflows from across the news production chain into a working setup.
From when a news story breaks on the wire, how do these cutting-edge agentic tools actually fit into assisting with the publication and updating of stories?
What can IBC Show attendees expect to see from you in Amsterdam?
Moments Lab’s contribution to the Incubator project is twofold:
- Discovery Agent suggests relevant content for a user to review when initially breaking a story, or as a story develops.
- We’re showing how an agentic workflow can help automatically associate new content with existing news stories. Instead of content being tagged incorrectly, or lost, MXT multimodal AI indexing technology determines which news story it is related to.
These two workflows then enable other vendor workflows once content is published to the SOM bus without the need to transfer content, jump to another UI or alert another team that it’s ready to be worked with.
