Chris Ronald Hermansen (TV 2 Norway)
As a public service broadcaster, TV 2 needs to make news accessible to all Norwegians. We wanted to make the complex US presidential election in 2024 easier to understand. Our goal was to create an innovative, personalized news experience that could explain our exclusive real-time polling data in a conversational way.
Our approach
We built a cross-disciplinary team of designers, developers, data scientists, and journalists. For the avatar, we used HeyGen to create an interactive digital version of the well-known TV 2 journalist Kjetil H. Dale, with ElevenLabs generating his voice from recorded samples.
We developed a smart system of AI agents that worked together, including routing, FAQ, fact-checking, data, and moderator components. Most innovative was our ‘numbers agent’ that updated daily with journalist-verified polling averages from TV 2.
Transparency was essential. We clearly labelled KI-Kjetil as being AI-driven through a 24-second introduction video and constant on-screen identification. We also maintained a public correction log for accountability.
Challenges
Our biggest hurdles included:
- A tight one-month development timeline before election day.
- Balancing innovation with ethical concerns about trust and misinformation.
- Technical limitations of HeyGen’s beta platform (though we secured capacity for 300 simultaneous users).
- Ensuring politically neutral and accurate responses on sensitive topics.
- The last mile of the LLM-based functionality – ensuring it always follows the instructions, and all answers are grounded in the facts provided.
- Calibrating the moderation agent to the right level of strictness.
- Limited monitoring capacity, which restricted service hours.
Results and next steps
KI-Kjetil answered 70,000 user questions over 106 operating hours, showing strong audience engagement with our election coverage and polling data. The project built valuable expertise in AI-driven journalism within TV 2 Norway.
We’re now exploring avatar anchors for future elections and improving our publishing workflows and feedback systems. Importantly, our measurements showed no negative impact on TV 2’s credibility – crucial for any public service media innovation.
The project sparked important conversations about AI in journalism while giving viewers a novel ‘second screen’ experience during a major international event.
This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of tech-i magazine.