Copyrights, AI, and the human-in-command methodology, shaping the next era of media analysis…

By Todd Murphy – President, FIBEP | Executive Director, Global Media Insights, Infoesearch

The communications measurement industry is in the middle of its most significant structural shift in a generation. Content licensing is being renegotiated. AI is changing how analysis gets produced. And the frameworks the profession has relied on for the past decade are being asked to do work they were never designed to do.

On 18–20 May 2026, I will be at the AMEC Global Summit in Dublin, joining a panel on Copyright in the Age of AI. I will be sharing FIBEP’s perspective on where the global content licensing conversation is heading, and how I am helping Infoesearch advance human-in-command methodologies for incorporating AI into media analysis. If you are attending the Summit, or simply working through these questions inside your own organization, I would welcome the conversation. Reach out anytime via LinkedIn.

What I will be discussing on the AMEC panel

I will be exploring two questions that I believe sit at the heart of this panel, questions every monitoring and analysis provider, and every brand that depends on them, will need a clear answer to over the next 24 months:

• How is content licensing being renegotiated in the AI era? Content is no longer being licensed for human readers. It is being licensed, ingested, and monetized for machine readers. That single shift reshapes the cost structure and access rules behind every monitoring contract.
• How should monitoring and analysis providers actually deploy AI? AI is not a replacement for human analysis. It is the substrate beneath it. The providers who thrive will be those who use AI to give their analysts more leverage, not those who use it to replace the judgment clients are paying for.

My contribution to the panel comes from a specific seat. As President of FIBEP, I started the Media Rights Trust Initiative (MRTI) – a stakeholder conversation I convened that brings together publishers, monitors, licensing bodies, legal experts, and others with an active interest in media content, content usage, licensing, and rights management. The MRTI is independent of FIBEP, but FIBEP was the impetus for it. Inside FIBEP, the MRTI works closely with our internal Copyright Commission to educate our members. Externally, the MRTI is working to inform and educate the broader business ecosystem on where this is all heading.

Combined with my operational role at Infoesearch, where I lead Global Media Insights for an organization of more than 1,500 professionals delivering 24/7 monitoring and analysis to global clients, I have direct visibility into where the policy conversation and the production-line reality are converging, and where they are still talking past each other.

Why the AMEC Summit is the right room for this conversation

The AMEC Global Summit has earned its position as the premier international event for communication, PR, media intelligence, research, data, and analytics professionals. The 2026 theme, Intelligence Applied: Communicator Excellence for the Future – reflects exactly the question our industry must now answer.

Three reasons this Summit matters more than most years:

• AMEC sets the global standard. The Barcelona Principles 4.0 and the Integrated Evaluation Framework are the reference architecture practitioners worldwide use to plan, measure, and prove communications outcomes. AMEC is actively updating the IEF right now. Dublin will be where the global community pressure-tests what comes next.
• AI cannot be discussed without the people who set the standards. The Summit brings together brand-side measurement leaders, agencies, monitoring and analysis providers, and the framework custodians, in one room, for two days. Decisions about how AI gets integrated into measurement need to be made with all four constituencies present, not in isolation.
• The PR profession is being asked to define new norms in real time. Disclosure, governance, attribution, and methodology transparency are no longer abstract policy questions. They are operational decisions every provider and every in-house communications team is making weekly. The Summit is the venue where those decisions get debated and aligned.

My perspective: where I have already been arguing the industry needs to go

These themes are not new for me. Over the past several months I have been writing publicly about how the practice of measurement and the operating model of media monitoring need to evolve to match the AI environment we now work in. Two articles in particular set up the arguments I will be making in Dublin.

On modernising measurement frameworks

In New Media Measurement Frameworks for the AI Age, I argued that the conventional framework structure moving from objectives through outputs to outcomes and impact remains the right foundation. It anchors evaluation in decision-making and prevents the substitution of activity metrics for actual results. That logic should stay.

But ten years on, two areas need to be made structural rather than optional. First, measurement needs to be a loop, not a line – the biggest gap in measurement maturity is not methodology, it is continuity. Most programs still treat measurement as something that happens at the end of a campaign, when the insight arrives after decisions have already been made. A modern framework should make plan-implement-evaluate-learn-adapt explicit and structural.

Second, AI in the workflow requires governance, not just disclosure. AI is now embedded across collection, coding, summarization, and insight generation. Updated frameworks should treat AI governance not as a footnote but as a structural element applied across all stages of measurement, documenting where AI was used, the human validation steps that governed it, and the limitations the assistance introduces. This is not skepticism toward AI. It is about the credibility of the measurement product.

On the next 24 months in media monitoring

In The Next 24 Months Will Redefine Media Monitoring, I made a more direct market diagnosis. The demand for media intelligence is not in retreat. The market is under pressure to mature. There is more content to process, more channels to monitor, and more urgency around reputation, narrative, and risk but clients are not asking for more volume. They are asking for better signal.

The core shift is from monitoring to intelligence. For years, much of this industry has been built around collection: find the content, tag it, deliver it. That work still matters, but it no longer differentiates on its own. When AI accelerates capture and summarization, value shifts toward interpretation and actionability toward decision-grade output that tells clients what matters, why, and what to do next.

Recent industry research from Meltwater, Muck Rack, Cision, and the FIBEP Board all point in the same direction: AI is now mainstream in PR workflows, measurement is being pushed closer to business outcomes, and teams are being asked to deliver more impact with constrained resources. Over the next 24 months, commodity monitoring will face pricing pressure while intelligence-led services will expand. The middle of the market will compress. The providers who keep that line clear between what AI does well and what human analysts must own, will earn lasting trust.

Where the threads meet: human-in-command, applied

The link between the panel topic and the framework conversation is the principle Infoesearch has built its current operating model around: human-in-command, not human-in-the-loop. The distinction matters.

Human-in-the-loop puts a person somewhere in the AI workflow as a check. Human-in-command puts the analyst in charge of the workflow, with AI as the substrate that does the high-volume work underneath. The output is faster and more accurate, and the methodology stays defensible to clients, regulators, and the AMEC frameworks practitioners are accountable to. Providers who get ahead of this transition will be in a stronger commercial position than those who wait.

This is what I will be advocating for on the panel in Dublin. It is what I have been writing about. And it is what we are operationalizing at Infoesearch every day across our global production environment.

If you are coming to Dublin

If you will be at the AMEC Global Summit on 18–20 May, I would welcome the chance to compare notes – whether you are a brand-side measurement lead working through your own AI governance questions, an agency thinking about how to advise clients, a monitoring provider re-architecting your delivery model, or a publisher trying to figure out where the licensing conversation goes next.

Reach out via LinkedIn, connect with the team at Infoesearch, or learn more about FIBEP at fibep.info. The conversations that matter most for the next decade of our profession are starting now, and the AMEC Summit is the right place to be having them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Todd Murphy is President of FIBEP, the global media intelligence association with more than 130 corporate members across 60+ countries, and Executive Director of Global Media Insights at Infoesearch. As FIBEP President, he started the Media Rights Trust Initiative (MRTI), a stakeholder conversation that brings together publishers, monitors, licensing bodies, and legal experts on the future of content licensing in the AI era. At Infoesearch, he leads the development of MIPO and MAPO methodologies (Media Intelligence and Media Analysis Process Optimization) and advises the global media monitoring and analysis industry on deploying AI inside service delivery while maintaining the human-in-command methodology that defends analytical quality. With an academic background in cognitive and behavioral psychology and more than 30 years of executive operating experience in media intelligence, he writes regularly on measurement frameworks, AI governance in PR, and the future of media intelligence.