Zach Seward: How a Five-Person AI Team Is Powering Innovation at The New York Times

In this live episode, host Nikita Roy sits down with Zach Seward, Editorial Director of AI Initiatives at The New York Times, recorded at the ONA x Newsroom Robots AI Leadership Summit in Detroit. With a background that spans journalism, product, and executive leadership, Zach brings a rare blend of newsroom insight and entrepreneurial thinking to the challenges of this AI era. Before joining the Times, he co-founded Quartz, where he served as editor-in-chief, CEO, and chief product officer, helping to pioneer digital-native journalism.

Now at The Times, he’s built a new editorial AI team from the ground up, experimenting with tooling, guiding newsroom adoption, and thinking through what comes next in how journalism is produced, distributed, and consumed.

Key topics include:

• How the Times is using AI to support investigations, including analyzing hundreds of hours of leaked video and massive public data sets using custom LLM workflows.
• Echo, the in-house summarization tool that’s helping reporters transform articles, headlines, and tags across a range of newsroom needs.
• Lessons from building a five-person AI team inside a 2,000-person newsroom and why newsroom trust and individual agency are central to successful adoption.
• Why Zach’s team sees itself as an “AI enablement” group and how their newsroom-wide roadshow has sparked experimentation.
• The role of AI in reader experiences, from improving internal search to exploring voice interfaces that reimagine how audiences interact with journalism.
• What it means to build durable, future-ready news products in a media environment increasingly shaped by AI distribution and personalization systems.

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