Building the systems behind publishing and content marketing

Monok began with a practical question: how much of the publishing process could software handle reliably?

Newsrooms and marketing teams spend substantial time finding information, comparing sources, selecting angles, preparing articles, sourcing images, formatting content, and distributing it across channels. Much of that work is repetitive, even when the judgment behind it is not.

We started by addressing one of the harder parts: generating news from multiple independent sources. Our early systems combined information retrieval, document clustering, natural language processing, and automated writing to produce complete articles and prepare them for publication. The objective was not simply to generate text. It was to build a system capable of carrying information through an editorial workflow.

The underlying ideas took shape during computer-science studies and research, including project work at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). They developed further through research and development work in the media industry before becoming Monok.

That distinction still matters to us. We have always approached automation as an engineering problem that must work in production, not only as a convincing demonstration.

By 2019, Monok's approach had attracted attention from researchers studying the emerging field of fully automated journalism.

In Fully Automatic Journalism: We Need to Talk About Nonfake News Generation, researcher Anya Belz of the University of Brighton examined Monok alongside Radar AI as examples of automated news generation already operating in practice. Her paper considered both the capabilities of these systems and the questions they raised about transparency, accuracy, and editorial responsibility.

In 2020, a study prepared for the European Commission, Trends and Developments in Artificial Intelligence: Challenges to the Intellectual Property Rights Framework, described Monok's technology in its review of automated journalism. The report discussed Monok alongside other early providers and examined the implications of AI-assisted and automatically generated content.

These were independent examinations of a developing field, not endorsements of our company. They remain significant to our history because they documented systems that were already producing and publishing articles at a time when much of the public conversation about AI writing was still theoretical.

Our first paying customer came from an unexpected direction: Marubeni, the Japanese trading conglomerate, through a US-based operation in Silicon Valley.

The team was looking for a way to automate Japanese-language news production and contacted us when few suitable products were available. We began working with them on a Japanese entertainment-news feed. At the time, Monok was still a technically demanding early product, far from the streamlined experience we offer today.

That first commercial relationship mattered. It showed that automated publishing was not just an academic or experimental problem. A business had a concrete need, found our technology, and was willing to pay for it.

Over the following years, Monok's systems were used to deliver content across a growing range of publications, subjects, and languages. We learned as much from customers' day-to-day publishing constraints as we did from research: the importance of editorial control, dependable delivery, relevant imagery, localization, and measurable results.

In March 2023, Monok won the SiGMA / AGS Startup Pitch at the Eurasia Summit in Dubai.

The competition brought together emerging technology companies. The recognition reflected a product that was already applying automation to real publishing workflows, combining software with human editorial expertise where needed.

It was a welcome milestone, but the work that mattered most continued afterward: improving the system, serving customers, and making increasingly sophisticated automation easier to use.

Monok was founded by Adam Sam, CEO, and Sam Sam, CTO. The brothers share a long history of building software together, dating back to an early voice-controlled Windows application they developed as children, years before Monok was founded.

Adam's academic background includes computer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, studies at Stockholm University, and research and project work at KAIST in South Korea. He also spent two years conducting behavioral research at Harvard University's Decision Science Laboratory, contributing to experimental design, research methodology, software development, and participant studies.

This combination of computer science, research, and practical systems engineering continues to shape how we work. We are interested in what intelligent systems can accomplish, but equally in how people use them, how they fail, and how to make them dependable.

Monok remains independently built and operated from Sweden.

Our focus has expanded beyond automated news. Monok now develops the infrastructure for repeatable, measurable publishing and growth.

That includes identifying relevant topics and search opportunities; producing and refining content with AI and human contributors; sourcing and checking images; adapting content for different languages and audiences; publishing to websites and content management systems; distributing material across channels; and using performance data to inform what happens next.

We also develop website and hosting services, integrations, and tools that connect publishing to wider marketing and distribution workflows.

Some customers want hands-off automation. Others want their teams to review and direct every important decision. We design for both. The purpose of automation is not to remove editorial judgment where it is needed, but to make that judgment more effective and reduce the manual work surrounding it.

Creating content is only one part of reaching an audience. Discovering what people need, deciding what to publish, getting it in front of the right readers, and learning from the results are equally important.

Our long-term goal is to advance automation across that entire process: marketing, distribution, and publishing working together as one system rather than as disconnected tools.

We believe this will make sophisticated publishing capabilities accessible to organizations that could never justify building large editorial, engineering, and marketing operations of their own. It should also give established teams more freedom to concentrate on original work, strategy, and the decisions that require human expertise.

More than a decade after the initial research began, that remains our direction: build useful systems, put them into production, and continue improving them through real use.