Business Insider is tracking employees’ ChatGPT usage as part of a new AI push

Business Insider wants more of its employees to use ChatGPT, and to use it more often in their everyday work. That was the message from an all-hands meeting at the end of April, during which several employees presented on how they have folded ChatGPT into their workflow, and leadership encouraged experimentation among holdouts on staff.

The all-hands presentation also included a slide with a leaderboard naming the 10 employees who are using ChatGPT the most across the company, including editorial staffers, according to Business Insider employees in attendance.

“We highlighted usage in a recent all-hands as a fun way to demonstrate how powerful Enterprise ChatGPT is for people across the organization and to give a shoutout to some power users,” said Amanda Howard, a spokesperson for Business Insider, in a statement. “We test, iterate, experiment and embrace new technology in the newsroom and across the company. When it comes to AI, we’re already ahead.”

Staffers in the meeting applauded these “power users,” but in private some employees shared concerns about the generative AI push and cracked jokes about the top 10 list. Many also had not realized management was tracking employees’ individual adoption rates of the technology.

“We were not previously aware that management was monitoring our members’ ChatGPT usage. We are concerned about this data collection and will be requesting further information,” said Morgan McFall-Johnsen, vice chair of the Insider Union, which represents over 200 reporters, editors, video producers, and other U.S.-based editorial workers.

In April, all Business Insider employees were given access to the enterprise version of ChatGPT for the first time. Chats generated on enterprise accounts are not used to train OpenAI’s models and have stronger encryption standards — the enterprise tier also offers up more user analytics.

Nearly 70% of employees at Business Insider, across all teams, are now “using Enterprise ChatGPT regularly,” according to Howard, who clarified that management can only see “general usage stats.” “Our goal is to get to 100% proficiency through training and other resources,” she said.

On the product side, over the past year Business Insider has folded AI technologies into an onsite search product, an ad targeting tool that “analyzes the sentiment” of content, and a smart subscription paywall. The current scope of its editorial adoption is less clear.

In an editorial meeting last week, Jamie Heller, the editor in chief of Business Insider, doubled down on the directive for reporters and editors to experiment more with ChatGPT, according to employees in attendance. Heller, who joined Business Insider last year after 20-plus years at The Wall Street Journal, shared an anecdote about how she used ChatGPT to brainstorm questions for a dinner she was having with an executive. She clarified that human editors were often still the best resource for editorial troubleshooting.

Editorial employees told me they’ve mostly seen use cases that revolve around using ChatGPT to analyze primary documents or conduct general research, not to draft text. But Heller’s comments followed a testimonial in the all-hands meeting by an editorial staffer, who spoke about using ChatGPT to draft transition sentences in stories and encouraged others to use it to help resolve sentence-level edits.

Despite this new push to integrate ChatGPT into editorial work, Business Insider’s internal AI editorial policy is still “in the works,” Howard said. This order of operations has left some editorial employees unsure of what use cases for the new enterprise tool are out of bounds.

The only reader-facing AI ethics or usage policy on Business Insider’s site is a 2023 memo, currently behind the publication’s paywall, published by former editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson. (Carlson transitioned out of his EIC role in August of last year and left the publication altogether in December).

In the memo Carlson wrote, “Please do not use [ChatGPT] to write for you. We know it can help you solve writing problems. But your stories must be completely written by you.” While using ChatGPT to draft sentences is very different from using it to draft full stories, the use case presented in the all-hands meeting is still a departure from this previously stated policy.

Leading the newsroom’s AI strategy conversations is Julia Hood, who previously headed special projects at Business Insider. Meanwhile, Jeff Rabb will start in June as the new chief product officer. Rabb has led the product team at The Atlantic since 2022 and last year oversaw the launch of Atlantic Labs, the publication’s in-house AI research team, which has already shipped a few experimental tools for readers.

Per the terms of its contract, the Insider Union also has a representative who is meeting with management to give input on these AI editorial policies as they are drafted.

“We have a right to have a seat at the table for any new tech guidelines, rather than just having a mandate dropped on us,” said Lily Oberstein, the unit chair of the Insider Union. “Our position is that no AI tool or technology should or can replace the work being done by human beings. Beyond that, we’re in conversations with unit members from every corner of the union to gather information and strategize. So it’s an ongoing conversation for us.”

In December 2023, Axel Springer, Business Insider’s parent company, was one of the earliest publishers to sign a licensing contract with OpenAI. Last summer, I reported on the Insider Union’s letter to management demanding to read a copy of that contract to inform its negotiations. McFall-Johnsen confirmed that, despite these calls for transparency, the Insider Union has still not been able to review the terms of the deal.

On May 12, The NewsGuild shared that over two dozen of its collective bargaining agreements across the country now include language about AI. Some prohibit union members from being laid off or receiving a cut in their base salary because of generative AI adoption. Most recently, the unions for New York Magazine and The New Republic successfully bargained for a version of these protections.

The Insider Union’s current contract ends in June 2026, and it is set to be renegotiated with management as the newsroom’s new AI policy is being cemented.

“I think journalists are especially wary about AI because we don’t want to be replaced (and since we care about things being accurate, we’ve already noticed how wrong AI often is),” one Business Insider employee told me. “But I think some of that reticence might hold us back from reaping the benefits of AI as a tool for doing things other than text generation.”