A Need for Nuance: The Economist’s Andrew Palmer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
How do we experiment with AI in ways that are productive but also safe? Today's guest explains how he's spurred new development projects with AI and recounts how various leaders he's spoken with think about the technology.

**Andrew Palmer** (0:15)
I'm Andrew Palmer from The Economist, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:21)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes. In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Today, we're joined by Andrew Palmer. He's a senior editor at The Economist, where he's the author of The Bartleby Column and the host of The Boss Class podcast. His current podcast season explores how the use of generative AI is changing management and jobs like ours. Andrew, welcome.

**Andrew Palmer** (1:16)
Hi, Sam. Nice to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:19)
Some of our listeners may not be familiar with The Economist or The Boss Class podcast. Can you give us a quick intro?

**Andrew Palmer** (1:25)
The Economist, for almost all of its history, has been a weekly news magazine. Now, of course, we're available in lots of different formats. We're published out of London, but we're global in our scope and we cover economics, business, politics, science, technology, and much more. And The Boss Class podcast is a serial narrative series podcast that I host on management and the workplace. We've had three series to date. And as you said, the last one was specifically devoted to this thorny topic of generative AI in the workplace.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:58)
It is thorny and I think you do a good job of exploring some of that thornyness. One of our colleagues, Ludwig Siegle, said in an episode, and I kind of pulled this out, the economist embraces change. We think technology is good and should be used. I always find that pro-innovation bias a little bit interesting because I have a background in computer security where we may have a little different bias about whether technology should be used.
But in this case, I think I agree with The Economist. How would you describe the journal's overall philosophy towards AI?

**Andrew Palmer** (2:30)
I would say open-minded experimentation is probably the way to think about it.
We have not rushed headlong into it. We have a variety of internal projects to see how we can use it in our journalistic processes.
For example, we fact check everything that we do. There's a research team there which has to pull through a tonne of stuff. Is it possible to make their lives easier while still having humans do the critical work of checking? Similarly, journalists have to conform to a style guide, a particular way of working. Can we make it easier for them to check that their copy is doing what it should before it gets to editors who then are the humans in the loop? There's a lot of internal stuff. Then we have experimented with things like AI-generated transcripts of podcasts that are available to people on our site. We have more secretive, if I told you I'd have to kill you kind of stuff around what we might be doing in two to three years. There's a whole panoply of things that we're doing, but we're always very, very clear that we have a particular brand associated with high quality human intensive processes, and there's a lot riding on us getting this right. We move fairly cautiously as well.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:47)
One of the ideas I think that came through a few episodes is this idea of a jagged frontier, that artificial intelligence has really amazed you in some areas, but also been unexpectedly disastrous in others. How does that affect the way you think about experimenting?

**Andrew Palmer** (4:04)
I mean, I think it probably comes back to that overarching mindset of being cautious, so that you don't just thoughtlessly embrace the technology, let alone if it's public facing. So everything goes through an experimentation phase, and one of the things that's become apparent, and you'd see this in every kind of organization, I think, who's grappling with this, is that you need to have really experienced people in the loop. So for us, that's editors who've been in the newsroom for a very long time, working out what counts as quality, providing feedback on the experiments that we run, so that over time it gets better and better and better, and asserting a pretty high bar for what counts as good enough. That's the way in which a mindset gets translated into actual processes for evaluating and checking. And it's a new way of working for us. I mean, we have, most of our history, the journalists have kind of controlled absolutely everything.