Cited Sidebars: Stacker CEO Noah Greenberg sits down with Pete Pachal of The Media Copilot

Cited Sidebars, Episode 5: Gates, Workslop, and Ads for Bots with Pete Pachal Pete Pachal, founder of The Media Copilot, joins Noah Greenberg on Cited Sidebars to talk about where human judgment belongs in AI workflows, how comms teams should get started with AI, and why publishers are starting to serve ads directly to AI crawlers. Topics covered: 1) What The Media Copilot is: a newsletter, podcast, courses, consulting, and now an AI-forward newsroom (0:31) 2) Founder reality: AI speeds up the work but won’t decide what to work on today (2:52) 3) What journalists and comms pros want from AI: help making sense of their world (4:52) 4) “Gates”: the stopping points where human judgment has to come in (6:31) 5) Workslop: the presentations, emails, and calendar invites nobody checked (8:43) 6) Crawl-walk-run with connectors, and knowing when to walk away from a chat (11:04) 7) The comms team starter pack: context over prompting, shared brand context, and governance (13:09) 8) Enterprise platforms, and why you don’t need to load your company’s whole history before starting (15:16) 9) Agentic content production: automating SEO, social copy, and metadata with human gates in place (17:57) 10) Ads served to bots: Time’s markdown experiment and what it could mean for publisher revenue (21:05) 11) How publishers and advertisers can test bot-facing ads, and why the creative looks nothing like a human ad (27:42) 12) The biggest waste of time: writing AI policy before anyone has used AI (31:11) 13) Why deep research is the best first lesson for any team (33:55) 14) Staying current without chasing every new tool (36:22) Cited Sidebars is Stacker’s ongoing conversation with the people building brand visibility in the AI search era — PR, independent media, agencies, and in-house teams, each one answering the same question: how do you earn attention, and prove it’s working, now that clicks and impressions don’t tell the whole story. Subscribe for more conversations with the people building the future of AI search and answer engine optimization. #AEO #GEO #AISearch #TheMediaCopilot #AIinMedia #PR