Ströer is one of Germany’s leading media companies, with a unique business model in the German media landscape. The company combines outdoor advertising, digital media, dialog marketing, and offerings in e-commerce and data as a service (DaaS). Its subsidiary t-online.de is one of Germany’s oldest and most widely read online news portals, providing readers with expertly curated news, opinions, and advice.

To increase reader engagement and facilitate knowledge transfer, Ströer aimed to develop a customer-centric AI assistant. The goal: to efficiently and personally deliver advice content to t-online users. As an AI assistant in a journalistic environment, the solution had to meet the highest standards for data quality, accuracy, security, and editorial tone.

“The expectations for digital services are rising in the AI era. Our goal was to develop an AI assistant that carries the editorial signature of t-online.de while operating reliably and securely,” explains Robert Becker, the director of product development for Ströer Content Group. Today, t-online users can prompt the AI assistant with custom or preconfigured questions and access useful answers from over 45,000 advice articles on t-online.

From the initial idea to deployment, the AI assistant was developed in just three months. Strict requirements for quality and individuality in a journalistic context demanded close collaboration between the product team, editorial staff, and partners. The partnership between Ströer and Slalom was marked by open communication, clear responsibilities, short decision paths, and high transparency.

A key principle was consistent user orientation. The AI assistant was designed not only to deliver accurate answers but also to support content discovery on t-online.de with preconfigured questions and recommendations per page.

“It was important to us from the start to bring our readership transparently and understandably along on the AI journey,” says Becker. “Positive feedback, interaction rates, and time spent show we succeeded.”

For many t-online users, the AI assistant was their first contact with AI technologies. Preconfigured questions helped users get the results they wanted, even without prior AI experience. Suggested interactions also allowed Ströer to manage the number of AI queries and thus reduce per-query costs.

“At the start of the project, we faced several challenges,” says Ina Fuhrmann, the product owner at Ströer Content Group. “We had to choose the right model to balance quality and cost. The technology also needed to automatically generate meaningful questions from our archive of more than 45,000 articles. Additionally, we had to ensure safety and trust through AI guardrails and optimize the process iteratively using a test-and-learn approach.”

The industry-specific expertise and customer focus of AWS, plus Ströer’s existing AWS infrastructure led Ströer to build the AI assistant on Amazon Bedrock. Components for natural language processing, personalization, and security complement the solution.

An integrated user feedback function allows continuous optimization. Users rate answers directly (thumbs-up or -down), and the Ströer team reviews negative ratings to adjust the AI as needed.

A central goal for Ströer was to empower its employees to operate and further develop the AI solution independently. Slalom provided hands-on training to transfer AWS-specific technological knowledge and valuable AI development skills to Ströer teams. “Building know-how was a core concern for us,” says Becker. “Slalom helped us expand our internal teams’ knowledge to operate and further develop the AI assistant independently and build future AI solutions in the same technological environment.”

Since launching the AI assistant on t-online.de in April 2025, measurable successes are already evident: interaction rates and average time per user have increased. “From today’s perspective, the project has already paid off for us,” Becker concludes. Ströer continues to build on this foundation and develop the AI assistant. The project has laid the foundation.