About 10 years ago, India’s Times Internet underwent a cultural transformation by infusing technology and a startup mindset into the organisation. 

However, “about a year and a half ago we decided our transformation had to be now hinged on artificial intelligence,” said Puneet Gupt during his keynote address at WAN-IFRA’s Bangalore AI Forum 2025 this morning.

Today, AI is not merely a buzzword at Times Internet – it is integral to almost every decision and process in the newsroom.

Building an AI-first organisation

Gupt, who was presenting remotely, stressed that AI has been a part of the company’s DNA for the past 18 months.

“If we don’t create an organisational structure that supports business as usual and high-velocity AI-driven innovation, then AI will always take a back seat,” he noted.

The emphasis is on boardroom support and behavioural incentives to ensure AI touches every part of the business.

Gupt compared the impact of AI to revolutionary inventions like the wheel and electricity.

“The wheel streamlined movement and electricity-powered economies. What AI is doing now is rewriting the future of work, market share, revenue, and even how our workplaces operate,” he said. 

Gupt also cited examples of companies already deploying “AI employees” to boost productivity through automating tasks, enhancing productivity, and driving growth across various functions. 

Driving revenue through AI innovations

Times Internet faces challenges such as an oversupply of content leading to falling eCPMs (Effective Cost Per Mille), and a younger generation increasingly engaged on social media. In response, the company has harnessed AI to:

• Build first-party data sets from massive click-tracking information. “We are in an era where relying on third-party data is no longer sustainable. By building our own AI-driven data sets, we not only future-proof our revenue streams but also create highly customised user experiences,” Gupt added.
• Balance conflicting priorities in the newsroom, where advertising and subscription models often clash.
• Enhance productivity across content, marketing, sales, and development teams.

A persistent challenge in the newsroom is reconciling the conflicting demands of the ads and subscriptions teams. To address this, Times Internet has implemented a “propensity to subscribe” model.

This model predicts the likelihood of a user converting to a paid subscriber, thereby optimising paywall placements.

“This strategy has improved paywall efficiency by about 50 percent, allowing the company to effectively cater to both revenue streams,” Gupt said.

He also showcased several AI-driven initiatives, including:

• Creative animation: Using tools like RunwayML (an online AI video editor), the company has animated static creatives to drive higher engagement.
• Times desktop: An AI-powered product that transforms banner clicks into engaging experiences. It integrates a multilingual chatbot – capable of handling OTP verifications and even featuring a virtual human – to drive 4x higher eCPMs for campaigns.
• Personalisation efforts: AI-powered personalisation has boosted click-through rates on push notifications by 95-100 percent and doubled engagement on content widgets. Notably, personalised notifications allow the recirculation of older content, extending the life of news stories.

Reinventing engagement and productivity with AI

To encourage reading habits and deeper engagement, Times Internet has also ventured into AI-driven games:

• Crossword puzzles: Clues generated from recent news stories via AI summarise and transform the content into engaging puzzles.
• Sudoku: AI determines the difficulty level and ensures a balanced game grid, streamlining what was once a labor-intensive process.

By leveraging AI to process millions of user interactions monthly, the company has dramatically improved audience segmentation. This has not only optimised cost – achieving around 80 percent cost savings – but also enhanced CPMs through more accurate and timely data classification.

Additionally, every aspect of Times Internet’s content management system (CMS) is now powered by AI – from ideation and story development to translations and multimedia production.

“For AI to truly drive impact, it has to be embedded into the newsroom’s DNA – not as an add-on, but as a core function that enhances creativity, efficiency, and decision-making,” he said.

Gupt stressed that while AI automates many processes, human oversight remains critical. Teams leveraging AI within the CMS have reported a 60 percent productivity increase compared to those that do not.

Concluding his keynote, Gupt reiterated that AI is not an existential threat to traditional media but a powerful enabler.

“We have to learn to use it right and create the necessary structures and incentives to move very, very fast,” he said.