Sophi.io, The Globe and Mail’s artificial intelligence-based automation, optimization and prediction engine, won WAN-IFRA’s 2021 North American Digital Media Award for the second year in a row - this time in the category of Best Paid Content Strategy.The North American Digital Media Awards honour news publishers that have delivered cutting-edge, unique and original digital media projects in the past year.

Sophi.io, The Globe and Mail’s artificial intelligence-based automation, optimization and prediction engine, won the 2021 Digiday Media Award for Best Publisher Platform, which recognizes technology that is most successful in helping publishers achieve their goals.“AI is an essential technology for helping publishers add authentic value to stories — extending their measure of success beyond page views and virality. For example, Sophi is able to provide data on how much each article on The Globe and Mail contributes to subscriber retention, acquisition, registration potential and advertising dollars. Additionally, to effectively deploy machine learning, around 10% of The Globe and Mail’s workforce is now data scientists and engineers, hired to develop Sophi and grow the strategy even further,” Digiday said.

Sarah Scire writes, “The Online News Association is holding its annual conference this week. One early highlight was Sonali Verma — senior project manager at The Globe and Mail, the largest newspaper in Canada — leading an absolute masterclass in dynamic paywalls on Tuesday.The Globe and Mail’s artificial learning technology, called Sophi, uses deep-learning techniques to automate and optimize as many publishing decisions as possible. Sophi, which was developed in-house at The Globe and Mail and has since been adopted by more than 50 outlets across 11 different publishers, helps curate homepages, choose which articles to post on Facebook, and more.

Sophi.io, a suite of AI-powered optimization, prediction and automation tools developed by The Globe and Mail, has partnered with Layout International, a supplier of cutting-edge enterprise technology, to transform print production. Sophi will provide the smart AI/ML technology to fully automate the end-to-end print production workflow to save publishers time and money and enable them to focus on creating high quality content.Print laydown is typically a long and arduous process, involving multiple editors and page designers and taking hours to complete. Without the rigid constraints of a template, Layout International customers will now have the opportunity to create a print-ready paper that is indecipherable from a paper prepared by human page designers, and the entire process takes just minutes. And for Layout International’s over 200 customers, this partnership means seamless integration of Sophi into their current NewsPublish editorial workflow.