Digital Transformation Is Dead. Now What?

For the past fifteen years, the media industry has been defined by digital transformation. Legacy organisations moved print to digital, broadcast to streaming and classified revenue to programmatic advertising. Some adapted brilliantly. Most adapted slowly. But all of them were essentially doing the same thing: retrofitting digital tools onto analogue foundations. The emergence of AI changes the equation entirely.

The Two-Track Industry

The media industry is splitting into two distinct tracks. On one side sit legacy organisations that have spent years and millions digitising workflows, migrating CMSs and retraining staff. These organisations view AI as the next phase of their ongoing transformation. On the other side sit AI-native companies that were born with machine learning in their DNA. They did not adopt AI. They were built on it. Their content pipelines, audience models and revenue systems were designed from day one to leverage artificial intelligence.

The gap between these two tracks is expanding rapidly. AI-native companies iterate faster, personalise deeper and operate leaner. They do not carry the technical debt of legacy systems or the cultural weight of decades-old editorial processes. For legacy media, catching up is not simply a matter of buying new tools. It requires rethinking the entire operational model.

Why Digital Transformation Falls Short

Digital transformation was about moving existing processes online. AI transformation is fundamentally different. It requires organisations to question which processes should exist at all. A digitally transformed newsroom might use a modern CMS and social scheduling tools. An AI-native newsroom uses machine learning to identify stories, generate first drafts for review, personalise distribution across channels and predict subscription conversion in real time. The difference is not incremental. It is structural.

The Path Forward for Legacy Organisations

This does not mean legacy media is doomed. But it does mean the playbook needs to change. Successful legacy organisations will stop thinking about AI as a feature to add and start thinking about it as a foundation to build on. This means ring-fencing teams to experiment without the constraints of existing systems. It means investing in AI literacy across every level of the organisation, not just the technology department. And it means being willing to retire workflows that were cutting-edge five years ago but are now holding the business back.

Moving Beyond the Buzzword

The companies that will thrive in the next decade are those willing to move beyond the comfortable narrative of ongoing transformation and confront a harder truth: the destination has changed. Digital transformation assumed the end state was a digital version of what existed before. AI transformation demands something new entirely. The media organisations ready to build from first principles, whether they are fifty years old or five months old, are the ones that will define what comes next.