When The New York Times appointed Zach Seward as its first Editorial Director of AI Initiatives in late 2023, he stepped into the role just as the paper was making headlines—for suing OpenAI and Microsoft.
“I started the job right before Christmas,” he told me during our live Newsroom Robots podcast taping in Detroit. “It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s that The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft and I learned about that the way everybody else did, which was the push notification on my phone from The Times app.”
That beginning set the tone for what’s proven to be a high-stakes, high-impact role. Rather than rushing into flashy deployments or quick integrations, Zach and his team have opted for a more intentional approach: slow, strategic transformation built on trust, education, and careful experimentation.
I sat down with Zach for a live taping of the Newsroom Robots podcast during the AI Leadership Summit in Detroit. The summit—co-hosted by Newsroom Robots and the Online News Association—brought together media leaders, technologists, and newsroom practitioners to grapple with urgent questions about the future of journalism.
Zach, who now leads AI initiatives at The Times, previously co-founded the business news site Quartz in 2012, where he served as CEO, Chief Product Officer, and Editor-in-Chief. His career has spanned editorial, product, and leadership roles—all now converging in his efforts to responsibly guide one of the world’s most influential newsrooms through the AI age.
Here are three key takeaways I had from our conversation:
1️⃣ Build AI Literacy Before AI Tools
Zach’s team has prioritized talking to people across the newsroom—what they call their “AI roadshow.” They’ve visited nearly half of the newsroom’s 2,000 journalists across 40 desks to walk through what AI is (and isn’t), where it can be useful, and how it might fit into their work.
“I’ve been surprised how much of the job has turned out to be talking,” he said.
This approach isn’t about evangelizing a new technology; it’s about expanding imagination and addressing real concerns. One recurring theme that kept coming up in these conversations? Summarization. Whether it’s writing homepage blurbs, SEO descriptions, or internal notes, summarizing content is a constant and time-consuming need. That insight laid the groundwork for what came next.
2️⃣ When AI Starts With the Problem, Not the Tech
One of the most telling examples of The Times’ approach to AI is a tool called Echo—an internal summarization assistant built by Zach’s team. Echo allows journalists to input links to Times articles and receive summaries tailored to specific needs—whether for homepage blurbs, internal notes, metadata tags, or newsletters. What makes it compelling isn’t the technology powering it (it runs on large language models), but how precisely it addresses one of the most common, everyday challenges journalists face: the need to repeatedly distill and repackage information.
Zach shared that summarization came up again and again in conversations across desks—an often-overlooked friction point that was slowing down workflows.
Rather than starting with the capabilities of AI and looking for places to apply them, the team is listening first—identifying pain points and building tools that solve for them in a way that feels native to how journalists already work.
3️⃣ Putting Journalism at the Center of AI Innovation
The team’s work is guided by three pillars, all identified from early on.
“First is using AI for research and investigations,” Zach said. “Number two is internal workflows and processes those like knotty or just robotic parts of everybody’s job… And then the last area of focus is reader experiences.”
A powerful example of the first bucket came from an investigative project involving the Election Integrity Network. The Times received a leak of 500 hours of internal Zoom meetings—roughly 5 million words of audio. Using LLMs and targeted prompts, the team was able to process, analyze, and extract key leads from that data—on deadline. That same pattern, Zach said, has been useful in many areas of coverage.
They’re also exploring how AI can transform reader interaction. The current search function, he admits, isn’t great. But experiments with embedding models are already showing promise. And when it comes to voice? He’s leaning into what’s next: “We should be prototyping what talking to The Times would be like.”
All of these insights reinforce something I’ve believed since launching Newsroom Robots: AI transformation in newsrooms isn’t just about technology. It’s about people, workflows, and culture. It’s about giving journalists the language and tools to experiment, ask better questions, and reimagine what’s possible without losing sight of editorial values.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or other major podcast platforms.
📍And if you’re in New York, join us on June 3 at New York University for our next Newsroom Robots live podcast taping with our guest Gina Chua, Executive Editor at Semafor.
Only a few spots remain—sign up here.
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