I marveled at the clarity and speed with which some Indian news companies are approaching AI initiatives during INMA’s dynamite study tour and conference in Mumbai.

For example, HT Media, which publishes the widely circulated Hindustan Times, has a remarkably focused way of thinking about where it uses AI.

One key learning has been that leaders should not ask what AI can do. Instead, they should focus on the problem to be solved with AI, said Puneet Jain, CEO of HT Digital:

“Because AI can solve everything. But if you don’t apply the efforts and priorities on the right problem, the outcomes will not be commensurate.” 

HT’s approach involves understanding AI intervention across three levels, Jain explained:

• A level one problem is when you have an existing product, process, or workflow you want to improve using AI. Typically, it leads to productivity and efficiency gains. “There have been more disappointments than successes when it comes to this because it’s just not easy to measure cost saved in some specific areas, and, more importantly, they get lost in some other areas,” he said.

• “The second stage of AI integration happens when you look to scale a particular solution which you know already works but you are not able to scale otherwise because of complexity, difficulty, or, in general, effort required in doing it. A typical example of this would be personalisation.” 

• “The level three of the AI intervention happens when you start imagining your products or experiences which until now couldn’t have been done without AI. That’s where disproportionate gains happen.”

HT started with level one problems, but its deployments now really focus on levels two and three, Jain said. 

For example, it uses four agents working in parallel to help its editorial team determine which story to cover by examining search trends, tracking the article’s performance in real time, comparing it to similar articles produced by other publishers, and providing actionable recommendations on how to improve the story. 

“We have been able to significantly improve SEO coverage by about 50%. Wherever these recommendations are accepted, we see an immediate jump in traffic and yield of 25%,” Jain said.

“The ranking insights are very sharp, and we are now analysing the performance not a day later but in complete real time.”

Still, building the tools was only half the battle. Writers could use an interface to understand how a story was performing, but they needed to “break their regular rhythm and come to a tool and do a pull-based search,” leading to spotty adoption, Jain said. All the recommendations are now pushed into relevant Slack groups instead, where journalists are already interacting. 

HT Media has also automated the production of articles in five formats.

“For all these formats, the starting point — or the raw material — is exactly the same: the standard text-based article created by editorial,” Jain said.

“We are able to generate all of these completely in the backend without any additional effort from editorial. Of course, there’s effort that goes into experimenting it, where there’s a sign-off that happens between product and editorial. But once it is perfected, at every article that is generated in HT Media, these formats are automatically created. And we see that the engagement on these formats is significantly more than a typical text article.”

Every single reader also gets a personalised homepage now, based on their behaviour and their own inputs as well as content that other readers find engaging. 

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