People Inc. Builds Custom APIs for AI Agent Access

People, Inc. is moving toward custom APIs that make its journalism easier for AI agents to process, chief innovation officer Jon Roberts said at Digiday's Media Strategies London event, Digiday reports. The interfaces provide article text in Markdown with details including the author and when an article was published or updated.

The publisher previously gave partners access through web crawling, then used Amazon S3 buckets to send updates and retract content. Its custom APIs remove HTML elements intended for browsers, reducing the number of tokens AI systems must process.

People Inc. is adding the same publication and update details to content used by its own AI tools. It will use those findings to structure access for AI partners and is not currently focused on selling advertising directly to AI agents. Digiday reports that the company laid off about 6% of its workforce last week.