AdaDerana.lk has won the Bronze Award under the category of "Best AI Solution in Media" at the National AI Awards 2026.
The solution was developed and delivered by Macro Labs at Derana Macroentertainment.
The award ceremony was held today (30) at Monarch Imperial in Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, as part of the National AI Expo & Conference 2026, under Sri Lanka AI Week 2026, pioneered by the Ministry of Digital Economy and SLT MOBITEL.
AdaDerana.lk is an integrated AI powered media ecosystem designed to enhance the complete news journey, from content creation and editorial workflows to audience discovery, understanding and accessibility.
Rather than introducing AI as a separate chatbot or standalone tool, Ada Derana integrates specialised AI capabilities directly into its Content Management System and digital platforms.
The solution combines multilingual article summarisation, language specific AI voice, live news thread summarisation, story evolution and timelines, narrative audio, and intelligent natural language search across English, Sinhala and Tamil.
The platform is designed around real world publishing requirements. AI reduces repetitive work, helps organise large volumes of information, improves content accessibility and enables audiences to understand developing stories more quickly. Human judgement remains central to the process. Editors can review, revise, regenerate, approve, enable or disable AI generated content before publication.
Accuracy, accountability and trust are built into the architecture. Generated summaries, narratives and search responses can pass through an additional verification process that checks AI generated information against Ada Derana's original reporting. Intelligent search is grounded in Ada Derana's own published news archive, allowing responses to provide relevant sources, context and chronological developments rather than relying on generic AI knowledge.
For audiences, this creates a faster, more accessible and more contextual way to consume news. Readers can quickly understand key information, listen to news, follow how stories evolve over time and ask natural language questions across the news archive.
For the organisation, OneCMS provides a reusable and scalable AI foundation that integrates with existing publishing workflows while maintaining editorial control, accountability and trust.
The overall vision is to move beyond individual AI features and establish a scalable, multilingual and responsible AI foundation for the future of digital media in Sri Lanka, using AI to improve how trusted information is created, understood, discovered and accessed while preserving human judgement and editorial responsibility.
