Al Jazeera Media Network today announced a major expansion of its strategic collaboration with Google Cloud, naming the company as its primary technology provider for Al Jazeera’s transformation initiative, ‘The Core’. This new collaboration aims to redefine the future of journalism by integrating Google’s advanced generative AI and agentic capabilities at the heart of news production.
Al Jazeera designed “The Core” as a pioneering operating model to shift the role of AI from a passive tool to an active partner in journalism. Unlike traditional digital transformations that simply digitize existing workflows, “The Core” reimagines the entire news production lifecycle, from information gathering to content delivery, by integrating AI with humans involved at every step. The project’s core mission is to enable journalists to focus on high-value storytelling by entrusting complex data processing and operational tasks to intelligent agents.
Sheikh Nasser bin Faisal Al Thani, Director General of Al Jazeera Media Network, said: “Al Jazeera is committed to establishing a global technology ecosystem that cements our leadership in the AI era. “The Core” is the embodiment of this vision: an integrated model where human expertise and artificial intelligence work in tandem to modernize journalism.
Alex Rutter, general manager of EMEA AI at Google Cloud, said: “Al Jazeera’s decision to build its new ‘core’ journalism platform on top of Google Cloud solutions is a crucial step in developing the next generation of intelligent media.
As part of this expanded collaboration, Al Jazeera will deploy Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise and advanced agent solutions for its employees to help them increase the efficiency of its global information network.
“The Core” project is designed as a cognitive operating model integrating AI into the heart of journalism. It is based on six interdependent pillars that form a single organic system:
- AJ now: This central news platform, described as the “heart of the news ecosystem,” will leverage the Google Cloud compute engine along with Vertex AI Search and Gemini Enterprise to suggest questions, generate angles and write summaries in its Partner-AI newsroom.
- AJ-LLM: As “editorial brain”, this pillar uses an extensive linguistic model refined on Al Jazeera archives. It integrates with Gemini Enterprise Suite for translation and summarization and uses NotebookLM to provide real-time analytical context to journalists.
- AJ Vision: The Creative Production Center will use a suite of Google’s generative AI tools to produce immersive content, including Imagen, Veo and others.
- AJ Data Lake: To enable data-driven journalism, this pillar will be built using BigQuery and Gemini Data Agents. These tools will help analyze large-scale data to discover trends and create predictive dashboards.
- The operational engine: Focused on operational intelligence, this pillar uses Gemini for Workspace to automate workflows, decisions and internal communications.
- The academic and knowledge branch: This educational pillar will train journalists in advanced AI tools using Google Workspace and Gemini Enterprise.
Ahmad Al-Fahad, Al Jazeera’s executive director of technology and network operations, said: “Al Jazeera is committed to keeping pace with the technological advancements that are shaping the media industry. We are constantly striving to integrate the latest tools and best practices into content production across our channels and platforms.”
Ghassan Kosta, regional general manager of Google Cloud in Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Iraq, said: “This is a defining moment for media innovation. Building on our successful deployment of Gemini Enterprise, we are honored to be the lead technology provider for “The Core”. Al Jazeera is setting a new global standard for how news organizations can leverage AI to not only drive efficiency, but also drive impact. We are proud to provide the globally secure infrastructure and agentic AI needed to power this next generation of journalism. »
