Tom Kelleher is Director of Emerging Technology & AI at The Telegraph, where he leads the teams responsible for turning new technology into revenue, from machine learning powering communications at scale to AI adoption across the business. He led the development of The Telegraph's smart paywall, which has grown subscriptions without sacrificing the discovery and search traffic the business depends on, and its subscriber-first personalisation strategy, both built on first-party data and judged on revenue rather than clicks. He has also put agents to work inside his own product teams, taking experiments from brief to live code, and is exploring synthetic audiences as a way to test ideas before they reach real readers. His view is that agentic AI will require a real media rethink: agents are starting to read on people's behalf, and neither publishers nor advertisers have yet worked out what an audience is worth when it never visits the page.