Home to some of Slovakia’s most-visited news and entertainment portals, Ringier Slovakia is one of the nation’s leading multimedia publishers. To maintain their edge and capture an even larger chunk of the market, they wanted to diversify their offerings, so they looked toward content-based services to enrich their portfolio.

AI, they realized, would allow them to quickly produce articles and scale their new services in a cost-efficient manner. After considering topics such as finance, travel, and police reports, they settled on weather due to their wealth of hard data that could be transformed into articles.

“The idea was to develop localized weather forecasts with some added value,” explains Martin Kuchta, Product Manager of Ringier Slovakia. “The fact is that a lot of weather forecasts in Slovakia are just graphs and icons. To fill the gap in the market, we wanted to develop personalized content that is more interesting and immersive for users.”

Azet Weather is already counting 45,000 users and upwards of 90,000 views per month. Most importantly, though, 70 percent of these users are new to the brand, having never registered on another Ringier Slovakia website. “From Azet Weather, we can now drive these new users to our other services, which will enrich our portfolio and increase our numbers as a group,” Kuchta says.

As Ringier continues to experiment with AIWA, they plan to shape prompts to deliver even more personalized, immersive content for users, thereby generating higher traffic. But the current iteration is merely a proof of concept. “We discussed this with our parent company, Ringier AG, and we decided that this is actually a really nice project because what we’ve built here is not only built for Slovakia,” Novák says. “We built this as a first prototype, but the whole idea is that this would be rolled out across Europe to benefit all of Ringier AG’s media outlets.”