Seven West Media upskills non-tech staff with new ‘AI Factory’

Seven West Media has opened its own ‘AI Factory’ in an effort to upskill its non-tech staff while also enabling its IT departments to develop AI-based pilots.

Seven’s director for data and growth, Andrew Brain

The factory will boost the skillsets of Seven’s non-technical staff and be used by its data science, solution architects, machine learning engineers and data engineers, to accelerate the development of AI-based pilots.

On Thursday the media network announced the AI Factory, a “dedicated” generative AI and machine learning team, designed to fast-track to data-driven products throughout the business [pdf].

The factory was developed in partnership with cloud, data and AI company Databricks and the Seven's data enablement team as the company works towards building digital engagement, audience understanding and advertising strategies across its 7Plus video streaming platform and 7NEWS digital platforms.

Seven’s director for data and growth, Andrew Brain told Digital Nation the AI Factory is about “democratising” data across the business alongside AI and machine learning and generative AI.

“It means that everybody can have an opportunity to understand what we're trying to achieve, but if they've got ideas about how they can use all those acronyms to make their life easier, to automate tasks they are currently doing if they don't need to necessarily be hands-on, then that potentially is something that we can stand up to the pilot quite quickly.

“We're running sprints of two weeks, so we're looking to spin up as many pilots in the next, probably eight to nine months.”

Brain said the pilots are aiming to assist with day-to-day tasks plus provide a strong return on investment in the form of time and cost savings.

He said all of Seven’s staff can “come with ideas” about how the technology can help day-to-day.

“As an example, one of the things we are we're launching internally now is we're launching a bunch of LLMs [large language models].

As an example, Brain explained rather than needing to ask its content team for the top ten shows from a certain time period, the LLM will be able to assist with such queries.

“It just gives [staff] a way of getting their hands on metrics or insights a lot quicker than what they ever had previously or couldn't do previously, which gives them more time to act, to make different decisions moving forward”.

Brain also said Seven has already completed a “whole bunch of work” around “re-engaging what we call lapsed audiences across 7Plus”.

“We all know that they're not all live on the platform every day or every month. If we can start to understand those lapsed users, how do we re-engage them and bring them back into the platform based on content that we think that they should be watching.”

He said with the channel attaining the rights to a variety of sports such as cricket and AFL, the station has “a whole re-engagement piece around that” which he described as “really exciting”.

“From a VOD [video on demand] perspective, we can now look at a high degree of accuracy around about probably 90 percent of what will be the most popular VOD content, not just by the day, but by the hour of the day.

“As an example, at 8.30om on Thursday night, Home and Away, is the most popular stream VOD content on 7Plus, because they're essentially watching or catching up from the days prior in the week."

Forecasting audience predictions

He added its data intelligence platform, 7REDiQ, can take first-party data insights from its registered users to determine further consumer understandings, leading to forecasting audience predictions.

“If you want to understand The Voice last night, you want to look at the size of the audience, the genders, the demographics at life stage.

“But you can also look at those against if they're a Visa customer or if they're an Equifax customer, or if they're a FlyBuys customer. You can get a snapshot of what last night looked like.”

Brain said the next iteration of its RedIQ platform will add value to its sales teams as “they can go, give me the next 28 days, five me the top shows on VOD.

“You can see what the 28-day view would look like from an age, gender because it's being predictive.

“There's value for content, there's value for marketing, there's value for sales and then, because of the forecasting tool, there's absolute value for finance who love accurate forecasting when it comes to revenue from sales teams, so it just gives them an opportunity to have a bit more comfort around forecasting as well”.