The News Product Alliance is excited to partner with the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) on the San Francisco AI Forum, taking place January 25-26, 2027 at KQED. The event brings senior U.S. product, audience, AI, and engineering leaders together with AI executives and experts from WAN-IFRA’s international network of publishers in San Francisco.
“AI is changing how publishers develop products, serve audiences and organise their businesses. Our San Francisco AI Forum, developed in partnership with the News Product Alliance, brings together visionaries and practitioners to share what they are learning and help publishers make better decisions. By combining WAN-IFRA’s global network with NPA’s product-first mindset, we want to help publishers build news products that audiences trust, value and are willing to pay for,” said Stig Ørskov, CEO of WAN-IFRA.
Over two days, speakers from news organizations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia will talk about the questions product and newsroom leaders are working through right now: how to earn revenue in a market for AI and content that has no settled model, how to scale AI adoption across a newsroom, and how to decide which bets deserve time, money, and executive attention when building has become so fast. A parallel Build track offers hands-on sessions with ideas you can take back to your team.
NPA has worked closely with the WAN-IFRA team on the program, with a focus on how product management is changing as AI speeds up prototyping and delivery. Most notably, we’ve put together a panel with product leaders from the GNI x NPA AI-Powered Next Gen News Sprint, a cohort of U.S. newsrooms experimenting with AI to reach a new generation of audiences, and the NPA team will also be on stage in other sessions.
“AI has made it much faster to build things, but a newsroom still needs people who can decide what’s worth building and keep it running once it ships. That product capacity is what turns speed into something useful for audiences, and it’s what many product teams are working on right now. This Forum gives them a chance to compare notes with colleagues from around the world,” said Becca Aaronson, NPA’s Chief Product Officer.
On January 26, you’ll find the NPA team and Board in these sessions:
“Your AI Backlog Is Not a Strategy: The Need for Deliberate Innovation and Placing the Right Bets”
In this keynote, Anita Zielina, NPA Board member and CEO of Better Leaders Lab, explains why prioritization is not a product team problem but the core decision-making job of boards and executive teams, and why too many organizations let enthusiasm or fear rather than strategy set the agenda. The talk covers how to let priorities follow strategy, how to place bets when no business model is in sight, and how to deploy resources so that speed does not turn into expensive motion.
“The New Bottleneck: Prioritization in the Age of Vibe Coding”
Vibe coding and agentic engineering have made building fast. When a full feature can ship in the time it used to take to scope it, the core questions of product management stop being “can we build this” and become “should we, and what else did we just make possible.” Aldana Vales, NPA’s Lead, AI and Audience Initiatives, moderates a conversation with three product leaders from the GNI x NPA AI-Powered Next Gen News Sprint, who will share what changed when their teams adopted AI as an integral part of their workflow.
“How News Executives are Preparing their Organizations for an AI Future”
Becca Aaronson, NPA's Chief Product Officer, moderates a conversation with Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Chief AI Officer for The Guardian, and David Smydra, Vice President, Product at POLITICO. They will discuss how AI is developing and the implications for news media in terms of products, business models and organization.
A special discount for the NPA community
NPA community members get a discounted in-person rate. To claim it, use the code NPA-MEMBER2027 by December 31, 2026. You can see the full program and register on the San Francisco AI Forum page.
