Indonesia’s KG Media outlines four-step plan to withstand AI disruption

Although the AI space is quickly filling up with powerful new players, the biggest disruption to the news industry may actually come from "our good old friend Google," said Andy Budiman, CEO of the Indonesian media group KG Media.

The search giant has enormous power over the news publishing ecosystem, he said, and a concrete example of this is how publishers' traffic is being affected by new AI-powered features in the search experience, such as Google's AI Overviews.

After first launching the feature in the US - which generate AI-written summaries about a search topic - Google rolled out AI Overviews to several other countries, including Indonesia, in August 2024.

One year on, the impact has been immense. KG Media's traffic to news content has declined by 37 percent since the launch of AI Overviews, Budiman said. For non-news verticals, the drop has been even steeper - 61 percent.

"So I think it's fair to say that AI is accelerating the disintermediation between publishers and audience," he said during his presentation at WAN-IFRA's Jakarta AI Forum 2025.

"Perhaps the most urgent question is no longer 'what if?' but 'what now?' What do we need to do right now to retain any sort of relevance in the AI era?"

Quality journalism and direct audience habits

KG Media has developed its own answers to that question, summarised in four strategic steps, Budiman said.

First, it is crucial to invest in journalism and journalists to stand out from AI-generated content.

"In a world flooded with auto-generated, commoditised content, I think the worst mistake that we publishers can make is to further commoditise this market with our own low-quality copy-and-paste summaries, or to use AI to produce even more content," he said.

"We need to choose a different path and differentiate ourselves through the quality of our journalism and the capability of our journalists."

To do this, KG Media aims to increase the number of its journalists who have been certified under Indonesia's Press Council's standards.

The company is also trying to shift the focus from volume to value and has created a content quality index. Both AI and editors score reporters' work, and those scores are tied to performance reviews.

Second, the publisher is investing to build its own platform to directly engage its audience.

"High-quality content is essential. But the content must be paired with habit and engagement on the platform hosting that content," Budiman said.

One of the things KG Media is doing to strengthen its platform is doubling down on broader content variety, he said.

However, Budiman acknowledged that KG Media's experience with building a digital subscription platform for Kompas, Indonesia's leading national newspaper, has been "quite humbling."

While aggressive digital marketing helps grow subscriber numbers, "it's much harder to turn these digital subscribers into habitual users," he said.

At WAN-IFRA's Asian Media Leaders Summit, Budiman previously gave more detail about the challenges with digital reader revenues in the Indonesian media market.

Read more: How two leading Asian news publishers balance subscriptions and advertising

Building non-ad revenue

Third, KG Media wants to diversify revenue streams beyond advertising and grow the share of its non-advertising revenue.

"Today, 60 percent of KG Media revenue is still based on the highly disruptible advertising model," Budiman said.

In contrast, other revenue sources such as events, book publishing, research and data services, and IP monetisation are more resilient, "and actually much more aligned with our long-term news brand," he said.

The company's final strategic goal related to AI is negotiating with AI platforms and try to conclude beneficial deals.

"If we truly believe our content has value, then we cannot allow the content to be scraped, crawled, and reused for nothing by AI players," Budiman said.

"The more differentiated, the more original the content is, the stronger our position when we try to negotiate. High-quality journalism not only matters for human audience but also AI companies, as our content can be training material for their LLMs."

AI future scenarios

Looking further ahead, Budiman outlined scenarios that publishers might face as AI continues to impact the industry, depending on the level of AI use in both news production and distribution processes.

At one extreme, the "AI Everything" scenario would mean that AI platforms are in charge of both news production and distribution, and audiences wouldn't really associate the content they consume with specific news brands or journalists.

At the other end is "Publisher Stronghold," where publishers maintain ownership of both their journalism and distribution, even if only with a smaller, loyal high-value audience segment.

Between these scenarios are "Ghost in the Machine," where journalists produce the news but AI platforms absorb and distribute the content (without proper attribution), and "Synthetic Syndicate," where audiences come directly to publishers but their news content is mostly AI-produced.

Even if publishers manage to maintain engaged audience relationships, Budiman said, it is difficult to imagine a future where most news outlets would engage directly with the majority of their audiences, because "most people probably prefer to find the information on social media or on AI platforms."

"But at Kompass, we always remind ourselves that even in the peak of the golden days, our newspaper would reach only around 1 percent of the population in Indonesia. But that 1 percent is quite enough to develop a business that can sustain our journalism."

Teemu Henriksson

Research Editor

[email protected]