SUMMARY

How is AI rewiring the economics of content, advertising and audience growth, and what does it mean for the founders and investors building what comes next?

This week Rich Ashton is joined by Josef Najm, Principal at Thomson Reuters Ventures, the $250M corporate venture arm investing across legal, tax, risk and compliance, and media and ad tech. Josef’s path into venture is anything but linear. It starts, genuinely, with selling Christmas trees, and runs through MediaMath, L’Oréal, Diageo and six years at Reuters, which gives him a rare operator’s read on where value is really moving.

At the centre of the conversation is Thomson Reuters’ trademarked concept of Fiduciary-Grade AI™: the idea that the professionals these tools serve, from lawyers to marketers deploying hundreds of millions in media, are fiduciaries, so the AI serving them has to meet that bar, with clean proprietary data, no hallucinations, and real accountability.

From there, Rich and Josef get into the shift from the ad-funded web to the agentic web, and the infrastructure that has to exist for it to work: data licensing marketplaces and attribution (TollBit, ProRata), the coming proliferation of enterprise and open-source model buyers beyond the frontier labs, and the missing quality-scoring and verification layer for content, on the basis that not all data is created equal. Along the way they cover agent-to-agent transactions and the challenge of verifying agents, the LiveRamp/Publicis deal and the future of neutral middleware, the Fox/Roku move and CTV, and why the smartest founders build for outcomes rather than for a specific acquirer.

Companies and threads referenced include AudioShake, Blaze AI, Bedrock, Index Exchange, Skyfire, TollBit, ProRata, LiveRamp, Roku and Fox.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 — Intro: how AI is rewiring the economics of content
• 01:54 — From Christmas tree sales to venture: Josef’s story
• 05:17 — Inside Thomson Reuters Ventures: a $250M single-LP fund
• 07:49 — Fiduciary-Grade AI: the through-line
• 10:05 — What “Series A” means now, and how the goalposts move
• 15:16 — AudioShake: reinventing archival content
• 19:44 — Audio as the next media frontier
• 21:55 — Agentic workflows for SMBs and the AI-native agency (Blaze AI)
• 25:26 — Picks, shovels and the transaction gap
• 29:35 — Monetising content in the agentic web: marketplaces, attribution and the quality layer
• 33:29 — Bots, tolls and copyright: how agents meet content
• 35:07 — Market sentiment, liquidity and M&A
• 38:31 — LiveRamp, neutral middleware and the Fox/Roku play
• 42:05 — Build for outcomes, not for an acquirer

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