Forbes: The Daily Brief
Introduction: Setting the scene
Most Forbes readers still arrive for one story. They land from search or social, read what brought them, and leave. The Daily Brief started from a different bet: Turning readers to listeners by putting the day's journalism in user's ear for nothing longer than five minutes, and they might stay for the next one.
The result, as Digiday later reported, is an AI-powered audio briefing on the Forbes homepage. Writers send summaries into Bertie. Bertie picks three stories and voices them. Product and editorial review the episode before it goes out. It launched May 29, 2026. Two weeks in, it was already among the top five most-engaged features on the page.
Impact
In October 2026, The Daily Brief won Gold and Silver at the W3 Awards. The Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts shared the win, and it was also posted by the Forbes design team.
- Gold — AI & Tech Features, Best Use of Responsible & Ethical AI
- Silver — AI & Tech Features, Best AI User Interface Design
The Solution
I led design on The Daily Brief. The central problem wasn't the audio. Inside the newsroom, the question was who gets the credit when a machine narrates the news? On the listener's side, the question was, "whether the audience knows they're hearing an AI voice, whether they can trace stories back to its sources."
Below is some of the thinking that went behind this product, from the consumer side of things and from the internal tooling side of things, enjoy!
