New AI storytelling co-pilot on Max Cloud helps station groups make weather content more distinctive, efficient and scalable - while keeping local meteorologists in full editorial control

ATLANTA - October 19, 2026 - The Weather Company today announced the general availability of Weather Story Assist ™, an AI-powered storytelling co-pilot offered on the Max Cloud™ platform. Max Cloud's suite of tools is designed to help unify the newsroom and enable broadcast teams to more easily collaborate, produce, and distribute weather content across stations. Weather Story Assist turns a single trusted forecast into distinctive, localized stories for linear television, streaming, web, social and mobile platforms.

By serving as an intelligent creative co-pilot, Weather Story Assist streamlines tedious preparation and asset discovery, allowing stations to produce higher-quality, differentiated content and expand their digital reach without increasing headcount. Crucially, local meteorologists retain complete editorial authority over every story, graphic and script created.

"Weather Story Assist lets a station's weather team stand out on every screen, not just the six o'clock news," said Steve Ward, senior vice president and general manager, enterprise media at The Weather Company. "By eliminating manual search and prep work, we're helping station groups deliver richer local storytelling and expand their digital presence, all while keeping the experts who know their local markets best in complete control."

Elevating Content Quality and Newsroom Efficiency
In today's fast-paced news environment, station groups face growing demand for multi-platform storytelling. However, weather teams often spend significant portions of their daily shifts manually searching for graphics, organizing assets, and formatting content across disparate tools. This routine leaves less time for the deep, localized storytelling that sets a station apart or the agile production of short-form, vertical content that digital audiences expect.

Weather Story Assist shifts the focus from preparation to presentation. It streamlines newsroom workflows and improves content quality by:

• Grounding the Story in Minutes: Surfaces historical content, record data, and compelling story angles behind the forecast - each clearly traced to its source - so meteorologists can build narratives quickly instead of starting from scratch.
• Intelligent Asset Search and Suggest: Comb through a station group's secure Max Cloud library to automatically recommend relevant scenes, graphics, archived video and local angles in the station's distinct brand and editorial voice.

Future Capabilities Coming Soon
As the solution continue to evolve on Max Cloud, upcoming enhancements will further expand station group efficiencies:

• Three-Tiered Personalization: Automatically aligns every story with the group's brand and editorial guidelines, station-specific market preferences, and individual meteorologists' presentation styles.
• Cross-Market Content Sharing: Enables station groups to easily search, surface and adapt high-value graphics and video assets across sister stations, maximizing the return on investment of created assets.
• Automated Vertical and Platform Adaptation: Instantly reshapes an established broadcast story into short-form, platform-native, vertical video and digital post drafts ready for fast meteorologist review and publishing on social, web, mobile and streaming.

Meteorologist-in-the-Loop Guardrails and Data Privacy
Built around strict "meteorologist-in-the-loop" principles, Weather Story Assist helps ensure that no content is published or aired without explicit approval from a meteorologist. Every suggested storyline and media asset clearly traces back to its original source, providing transparency and trust.

Operating entirely within a station group's secure, private Max Cloud environment, Weather Story Assist learns exclusively from that group's proprietary content, brand guidelines and usage patterns - ensuring custom intelligence without sharing data or training across external platforms or customers.

Industry Interoperability
Reflecting The Weather Company's commitment to open newsroom innovation, the company is an official participant in the IBC Accelerators industry consortium. The Weather Company is actively contributing to the development of the Story Object Model (SOM) schema ahead of industry standardization, and Weather Story Assist is being designed to support SOM to help ensure seamless integration across newsroom control systems.

Weather Story Assist is available now as part of the Max Cloud platform offering. For more about Weather Story Assist, visit weathercompany.com/media/weather-story-assist.

About The Weather Company
The Weather Company helps the world navigate changing conditions and build weather resilience. As the world's leading weather provider, we fuse deep meteorological expertise with immense data scale and cutting-edge AI to turn atmospheric chaos into actionable intelligence. We deliver enterprise-grade products at a massive consumer scale - providing the same verified data and reliability to a single app user as we do a global airline. We serve hundreds of enterprise customers and are trusted by hundreds of millions of people monthly via digital properties like The Weather Channel (weather.com), Weather Underground (wunderground.com), and Storm Radar. Visit weathercompany.com.