When Penske Media Corporation (PMC), the media company behind iconic brands like Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard wanted to integrate generative AI across their ecosystem of publications, they turned to Fueled’s enterprise WordPress practice, 10up. With an eye toward experimentation, speed, and efficiency, PMC worked hand-in-hand with our team to iteratively integrate and deploy AI features with a focus on improving editorial workflow productivity, improving visitor engagement, and driving SEO.
At the heart of this collaboration was ClassifAI, our open-source AI toolkit for WordPress. ClassifAI makes it easy for enterprise content teams to bring advanced AI capabilities like smart content tagging, SEO-optimized title recommendations, image generation and automatic image descriptions to WordPress. Its flexible, service-agnostic architecture gave PMC the ability to securely and seamlessly integrate their preferred and existing cloud services provider, Microsoft, using Azure’s OpenAI service.
Working as one team with PMC product owners and engineers, we rapidly prototyped and deployed enhancements to existing AI-powered features in ClassifAI and entirely new features. Experiments and notable improvements that made their way back into ClassifAI included:
- Smart 404 pages that use page URLs to suggest relevant content, reducing bounce rates by 15%;
- Advanced category and tag cleanup capabilities that improves taxonomy hygiene and thus SEO performance;
- New UX paradigms for evaluating and managing AI recommendations, making it easier to carefully review and provide oversight around AI recommendations;
- Granular role and user based feature controls that support change management in the newsroom by enabling rollout of new AI features at a controlled pace.
Asked to reflect on the impact of the engagement, PMC’s Senior Vice President of Technology, Gabriel Koen, remarked, “[ClassifAI] allowed our team to explore AI solutions quickly and in a cost-effective manner. We appreciated the collaborative process … which helped us understand how to integrate AI more effectively into our publishing workflow. This partnership has been crucial in helping us better understand and utilize generative AI.”
Fueled and our WordPress practice, 10up, has been innovating with AI since the days of Machine Learning in 2018, and we’ve built the internal tools and expertise to help publishers and enterprises like PMC move fast without sacrificing quality or governance. Whether you’re exploring AI, looking to modernize your publishing platform, or both, we’re eager to help.
Head over to the 10up site, home to our enterprise WordPress practice, to read the full case study detailing our AI collaboration with PMC. Ready to drive engagement with efficiency and AI for your content? Let’s talk.
