News Broadcasting
India Today builds AI newsroom platform with Google to slash turnaround times
The media group’s proprietary tool, Pragya, has cut content creation time by 30 per cent and doubled user engagement
NOIDA: India Today Group has stopped waiting for the future of journalism to arrive. Working with Google, it has built it. The media group has developed Pragya, a proprietary AI-driven newsroom operations and workflow automation platform, in collaboration with Google, and integrated it directly into its content management system. The results, by any measure, are striking: a 30 per cent reduction in content creation and publishing turnaround time, a 10 per cent increase in content production and a twofold rise in user engagement.
Pragya tackles the friction points that have long plagued large-scale newsrooms: manual processes, fragmented communication between field reporters and editorial desks and sluggish publishing cycles. The platform introduces AI-assisted features including automated keyword generation, story highlights, kickers and draft story creation, freeing journalists to concentrate on reporting, analysis and verification. Crucially, every AI-generated output passes through a human-led editorial review process before publication, ensuring accuracy and journalistic integrity are not traded away for speed.
The platform also comes with a dedicated journalist app that allows field reporters to file text, audio, video and documents in real time, feeding directly into internal broadcast and publishing systems. The result is an end-to-end pipeline, from on-the-ground reporting to final publication, that is faster, more structured and more visible to editors at every stage.
Kalli Purie, vice chairperson and executive editor-in-chief of India Today Group, described the initiative in terms that capture both its ambition and its anxiety. “In our mission to protect the rarest mineral, ‘public attention’, our partnership with Google to build Pragya has added a high-octane layer of agility to our bedrock of trust,” she said. “We are perfecting the ‘AI Sandwich’: blending machine efficiency with human storytelling. It’s a newsroom upgrade where technology empowers every voice to keep news verified, vital and accessible.”
The broader media industry has spent years debating whether artificial intelligence will hollow out journalism or supercharge it. India Today Group has chosen to answer the question empirically rather than philosophically. Pragya does not replace reporters. It clears the clutter so they can do more of what only they can do. In a news cycle that never pauses, that may be the most competitive advantage of all.
