Unlocking the power of AI agents through interoperability is the goal of an “IBC Incubator” called “Smart Stories: The Agentic Production Ecosystem.” The project is being led by “champions” Associated Press, NBCUniversal, ITN and BBC with “co-champions” Channel 4, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, Sky and ITV and supporting vendors Shure, EVS, Cuez and Moments Lab.

The group is developing an open standard, the Story Object Model (SOM), aimed at communicating story context between different systems from newsgathering all the way to distribution. It is also developing an associated schema that will allow broadcasters to create AI “skills” that guide agents to automatically perform production functions according to their own unique workflows and editorial standards.

Just as the Media Object Server (MOS) protocol emerged in 1998 as a way for live production equipment from different vendors to communicate with each other to perform key functions like playing out a story from a rundown, SOM is seen by the Incubator team as a way for different agents to communicate with each other about changes in a story and then automate the appropriate response.

“The breakthrough that this group hopes to accomplish is that the various systems involved are getting smarter as the vendors put more AI capabilities into them,” says Brian Hopman, VP & GM of workflow solutions for AP. “What doesn’t exist is a way for those systems to share that intelligence from one to the other.

“We’ve had MOS as an industry, which helps us say, ‘Story A1 has these assets in it. Make sure you play Story A1 and play these assets when it’s on the screen,” Hopman continues. “But this goes many steps beyond that, because we need the systems to know, ‘Well, what is Story A1? What’s it about?’ If it’s about severe weather that impacted the New York area and we just learned that there’s 50,000 homes without power, not 5,000, how do we make sure all of the systems get updated with new information? How does the newsroom system talk with the graphics platform and the digital CMS?  As we become smarter about things, as we learn information, we need it to go everywhere.”

The SOM project follows work on successive IBC Accelerators by a core team of news technology experts including ITN CTO Jon Roberts and BBC Solution Lead for Live Production Control Technology Morag McIntosh. That work started before there were any conversations about AI, says Roberts, and initially focused on leveraging “the benefits of software-defined tooling” in live production workflows for the “Gallery-Agnostic Live Production” project, presented at IBC 2023.

That project, which tackled how a top software layer could connect various software tools from different vendors, led the group to focus on two key areas that needed improvement: integration and user interfaces.

“How do we make these tools better interact with each other, and then interfaces,” Roberts says. “How do we do it better? How do we think about the front end differently to allow users to more effectively interact with what is an ever-growing set of tools that they’re presented with.”

The group moved on to a new accelerator project the next year, “Evolution of the Control Room, leveraging XR, Voice, AI and HTML-Based Graphic Solutions,” which “introduced AI to the equation,” Roberts says.

That 2024 project featured a simple AI implementation, integrating the ChatGPT large language model (LLM) into a software-defined live production system to allow the user to control the rundown through voice commands and also to ask questions of the rundown.

While the progress of the 2025 Accelerator was impressive and even earned the project a Broadcast Tech Innovation Award, the group knew there was still a fundamental problem that needed to get solved. That was automatically communicating story context across the various systems used in the news production process from newsroom to playout.

Moments Lab has already found success with its “multimodal AI” technology helping big station groups like Sinclair and Hearst better organize and access decades of archive content. The company is now gaining traction in day-to-day production as news broadcasters look to seamlessly mix fresh and archive content to help their journalists tell better stories, says Moments Lab CEO Philippe Petitpont.

“Basically, we’re helping digital teams to create new stories for social media and for their CMS by mixing the fresh content, something that just happened, with something that might be older,” Petitpont says.