EidosMedia has provided a glimpse of its upcoming AI-powered Neon CMS, due for release next year.

Project lead Francois Vermaut says the new end-to-end digital platform harnesses AI technology “to keep publishers ahead of rapid developments in audience expectations”.

Rapid evolution in consumer expectations matched by accelerating changes in content technologies – especially generative AI – have led to the development of a “technologically agnostic” platform using an interchangeable architecture.

Vermaut says among the most exciting new technical developments in news creation and distribution are those powered by AI and ML models. “With these technologies, the choice is between building them into the core platform capabilities and integrating them as third-party tools and services,” he says.

Neon will adopt both approaches, with built-in AI capabilities to assist editors in prioritising and scheduling news coverage, as well as AI-optimised paywalling.

Large language models will also help with tasks such as summary creation, story tagging, and social media posting. Web page composition will be handled by AI-driven routines that automatically optimise the layout and presentation.

Neon will continue the “headless” approach already deployed in EidosMedia’s Cobalt platform, supporting presentation-agnostic APIs that can accommodate a wide variety of destination types.

Vermaut says the user interface will be an evolution of the current Swing mobile workspace, making it accessible at any location via any device, with “a rich roadmap of new functionalities” to be introduced following initial release.

Print and digital publishers will be offered a Neon platform “fully backwardly-compatible” with their print workflows in Prime and Méthode, while digital-only publishers will be able to replace their Swing-Méthode-Cobalt solution with an end-to-end digital platform based solely on Neon.

Neon is about to go into beta-testing at sites in Europe and will be commercially released in late 2024 or early 2025.