As Creative Director of RTL Nederland, Ralph de Beurs leads the creative unit that develops formats and series for RTL and Videoland. These include non-scripted formats such as B&B Vol Liefde, De Verraders and Waar de F*ck is Stuk?, as well as the drama series De F*ckulteit.

“In our work, we use AI every day. It is, for example, a fantastic tool when developing formats and series. Whereas in the past I could only describe an idea during brainstorming sessions, I can now visualise it with AI and show it to my colleagues straight away. We use AI video tools such as Runway and Google Veo 3 to create scenes we have in mind, as though we had already shot a pilot.

Another goal we have for AI is to make our content more creative, and our processes faster and smarter. For daily current-affairs programmes such as RTL Boulevard, we’re now experimenting with AI to write texts, generate visuals and create rough cuts. We upload the source material for individual items and AI produces the first edit. That saves us an enormous amount of time.

We also use AI during post-production. For the series Tonnano, the makers had filmed a scene in English. It later turned out that the actress in that scene should have been speaking German. Instead of re-shooting the entire scene, the makers used her voice, with her permission, and altered her lip movements so that her lines appeared in German.

The fact that we ask the actress for permission is one of the agreements set out in our AI guidelines for all producers working for RTL and Videoland. In a world full of fake news, we want to stand apart. We use AI to enrich our content and make processes more efficient and cost-effective, not to tamper with the truth.”

Katrijn Vrints is Director of Brand Management, B2C Publishing, and together with her team she builds the brand campaigns that strengthen trust in the news and magazine brands. They are actively experimenting with various AI tools.

“For us, 2025 was the year of exploration: discovering how we can make the best possible use of AI when creating our marketing campaigns. We believe that artificial intelligence can help us make our communications faster, smarter and more personal. But first we need to learn how to work well with the different tools. That is why last summer we created our very first AI campaign. We used programmes such as Kling, Google Veo 3 and Adobe Firefly to create images and animated visuals, which meant that we did not need an expensive location shoot. Not everything went smoothly, but it was an interesting experiment from which we learnt a great deal.

In addition to working faster, we also see opportunities to use AI to make our creations more scalable and more personal. We’re currently building our own Design Automation tool, mAIstro – a workflow that allows us to combine photographs of real people from different backgrounds with automated copy, always within our brand guidelines. That enables us to create more variations in order to engage our target groups in a more tailored way. A young reader in Amsterdam who wants to discover Het Parool has different interests from a 55-year-old who has been a subscriber for years.

There is, however, one important caveat. Because of AI, people sometimes no longer know what is real and what is not. Brand trust is the foundation of our brands. That’s why, in the spring, we drew up an ethical framework to guide our marketers. It contains a number of rules of thumb. For example, all the people featured in our campaigns are real. In addition, we work according to the principle of ‘human–machine–human’. AI is a tool; creative autonomy and final responsibility remain with our own creators.”

Mark Langeslag is Lead Innovation at ADR, the group comprising AD and the regional news media. He helps shape the direction that DPG Media’s newsrooms take in the field of AI. Together with colleagues from other news titles, he develops AI applications for the in-house editorial system.

“We have a number of colleagues who focus on artificial intelligence. They first look at where AI can support our journalists, and then experiment with different tools and prompts. Once the output is good enough and clearly adds value, we integrate those functionalities into our own editorial systems.

One example is the ‘Headline King’, which uses an article and the chosen angle to generate suggestions for strong headlines. The final say rests with the editors. We also have the ‘AI sub-editor’, which offers suggestions for improving the text in terms of spelling, style and grammar. AI has also enabled us to roll out the News Service at ADR and HLN. We scrape hundreds of local sites in search of news items. An editor selects the most locally relevant topics, after which AI produces a first draft of a news item, allowing the editor to publish very quickly.

Every journalistic decision remains a human judgement. But this does show how AI forces us to think about the question of what sets us apart – and what doesn’t. We clearly don’t make a difference with simple local service items, such as changes to the opening hours of the recycling centre. But if the heating hasn’t worked for weeks in a block of flats in Leidschendam, we can produce a human story about Annie, shivering on the third floor beside her electric heater. AI can help us do an even better job in the areas where we’re strong, while handling more efficiently the things that do not set us apart.”