The Best Content You Own Is The Content You Forgot About
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
Oh, we do love the idea of evergreen content. It’s the dream: write it once, watch it drive traffic forever, build authority, dominate search rankings. But let’s be honest: most “evergreen” content is just abandoned blog posts gathering dust in the darkest corner of your CMS. We call it evergreen because it sounds better than “content we wrote three years ago and never looked at again.”
TIME Magazine just showed us what evergreen content can actually do when you stop letting it rot.
Their new TIME AI Agent turns over a century of archived journalism into an interactive experience. You can ask it anything—“What did Truman say about the atomic bomb when it was first used?” or “How did TIME cover Kissinger over the decades?”—and it pulls together summaries, generates audio briefings, translates into 13 languages, or stages debates using quotes from actual reporting. I asked it questions after watching Netflix’s A House of Dynamite the other night, and it pulled up original coverage from 1945. Not a generic summary. Actual TIME reporting, with attribution, turned into a conversation. It’s not a chatbot stapled onto a search bar. It’s a genuinely new way to experience content that would otherwise sit there, searchable but not doing nothing useful.
Whether this exact approach works for your brand depends on what you’ve got in the vault. But if you’ve been accumulating content for years—interviews, how-to guides, event coverage, product reviews—you’re sitting on something people might actually want to explore, if only you’d make it worth their time.
Imagine you’re a sports apparel brand with hundreds of athlete interviews, training tips, and event coverage (looking at you, adidas). Why wouldn’t you let users ask, “What do ultramarathon runners say about recovery?” and get a synthesized answer pulled from your archive? Or you’re a food retailer with recipes, chef interviews, and sourcing stories. Someone could spend an hour discovering your content by asking questions instead of scrolling through a blog index from 2019. Or you are a travel site… the list goes on. The content is already there. You’re just making it conversational instead of static.
The good news: building something like this isn’t as hard as it sounds.
You could realistically get 90% of the way to TIME’s setup using OpenAI’s Agent Builder in an afternoon. It’s drag-and-drop, it connects to your content, and it works. We cover it in one of our workshops for paid members, How to build AI Agents. The technical barrier isn’t what it used to be. The real barrier is realizing your archive isn’t a graveyard—it’s an asset you’re just not using.
Because remixing your evergreen content into something interactive isn’t just “cool”. After all, you’ve already paid to create it. You’ve already spent the time building authority. Now make it work harder than sitting in a corner of your CMS, waiting for someone to stumble across it in Google.
If TIME can make 100 years of journalism feel new again, you can probably do something interesting with the last five years of yours.
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