One of the many outstanding speakers at INMA’s Mumbai conference in July was the head of digital design and product at The Times of India, Rohit Garg, who outlined dozens of ways AI is helping one of India’s largest news publishers go faster and further than ever before.

“We always had diverse user needs,” Garg said. “We always had volume. We always had velocity. We always had consistency that we were creating at scale. What AI is helping us do is doing all of these things more efficiently. It helps us ensure that we don't crack under chaos.”

That sounds like an efficiency play, right? But at Times Internet, AI is actually helping the team create new personalised products, with an eye to unlocking new revenue.

For example, they have created an AI anchor (which is, incidentally, quite common in the Indian news industry) for a streaming financial news show.

The next step is personalisation.

“What we think and what we are researching is a future wherein, imagine you as a person put in your five, seven, 10 stocks and you pay for it. And then there is a live anchor which generates this summary, this synopsis specifically for you,” he said. “This can run 24/7. This minimises editorial workload.”

The Times is also using AI to drive personalised push notifications — where different people receive different alerts based on their preferences. The headlines are also rewritten for different types of audiences to increase engagement.

How about news products for meeting a different user need? The Times’ team has created a completely AI-generated satirical take on news in a scroll-first format for social media, where it has garnered more than 1.5 million views in a month.

Another creative use of GenAI: creating a crossword puzzle based on the previous day’s news as well as a new game called Connect. 

“The advent of AI has helped us create some of these games at a much faster pace than we were able to do before. Till some time back, we were only able to create games like Sudoku or crosswords using AI. Now, we are using AI to think of new games. A recent example is the game called Connect, which went live last week. It took us 15 days to ideate and 15 days to implement it.

“Within a month, we created a game which never existed earlier, and we have 1,000 copies of it stored in our database because the AI algorithm has helped us create 1,000 copies which are unique to each other. And we are already seeing great traction on that game. It is, in fact, the best-performing game right now on our platform.”

The Times has also used GenAI to create a product with strong audio-visual elements to reach new audiences.

“Can we have news rewritten for young minds between 8 to 11 years old wherein the news is written to make sure that it resonates with them? Not the Gen Zs but somebody who is in school right now. It’s a kids-first AI rewriting engine. All the stories are rewritten keeping kids in mind,” Garg said.

In advertising, The Times has further improved upon its ad chat product, which answers readers’ questions about the product being advertised instead of displaying simply a box ad or a banner. It is now integrated with WhatsApp, a platform used by more than 850 million people in India.

“This also leads to automated lead capture,” Garg said, while the back-end captures insights from the conversations.

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