How Time evaluates and vets AI tools
By Sara Guaglione • March 28, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →
Time has evaluated “dozens and dozens” of AI tools to determine what could be a good fit for the company, both as enterprise tools to help employees work more efficiently, and to help build products for its direct audience, according to Time CTO Burhan Hamid.
If the AI tool uses Time’s data to train its models, that’s a dealbreaker, according to Hamid, who spoke at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, on Wednesday. That policy is in place to protect the company’s confidential information, he said.
Another step in evaluating and vetting AI tools for Time’s use is going to the company’s legal team to have them look into what data protections and indemnification are in place.
Hamid also wants to meet the AI companies’ founders. “Is it a two-person startup, or is there an actual company behind this? And in many cases, we want to support two-person startups also, but you have to understand and do an analysis of, what kind of other customer base do they have? Are they going to be around in a year? That kind of stuff,” Hamid said.
There’s also a risk analysis that needs to be considered — to some degree.
“It’s tough right now,” Hamid said. “The space is moving so fast that if you slow down to assess risk for everything, you’re never going to get anything done. So it’s a balance of partnering with companies that are massive in scale [like OpenAI, Perplexity and Google] and building some sort of trust and relationship there. And trying out smaller products in controlled environments, as a proof of concept — whether it’s just a product and engineering team in low risk areas, before going larger with them.”
Time — like other publishers — also has to deal with some hesitation from employees when it comes to adopting AI tools.
“Lots of employees at companies are concerned about job safety, and that’s a legitimate concern,” Hamid said. But he stressed that it’s important for employees — and their bosses — to learn how to use AI tools.
“It’s not the tools that are going to replace your job, but somebody else who knows how to use these tools can replace your job,” he said.
Once approved, Hamid said he tries to get these AI tools into employees’ hands fast.
“There is the old school way of buying a platform and then coming up with the rollout plan and going department by department and rolling it out. And I personally just don’t have the patience for that anymore. With AI, it’s moving so fast that by the time we’ve done that kind of thing, there’s already five other ways to use it that have come out, or five other new tools that have come out,” Hamid said. “Waiting for your CTO or CIO or tech person to teach you how to use them, you’re going to be left behind, and you’re never going to learn it that way. You have to actually use it to learn it.”
One of the AI tools Time has recently adopted is Glean, which a third of the company is now actively using after it became available to them in January, Hamid said.
Glean is an enterprise tool hosted on Time’s Google Cloud infrastructure that connects all of the data from different platforms into a search-like experience. That means an employee can access information they’re privy to from SalesForce, Github, Gmail or Google Drive into one search index, for example.
“You can interact with it like you would a chatbot, like a ChatGPT,” Hamid said. (Employees can also access ChatGPT in Glean, due to Time’s licensing deal with OpenAI that gives them the ability to plug in the AI company’s API key.)
Time introduced the tool to its sales and revenue teams first, to help the sales team build briefs. Pre-built prompts can be saved in the platform so that when a company name is typed in, the tool will build a brief that a salesperson can use to pitch to that company, Hamid said.
The sales and revenue teams were first to use Glean, as part of Time’s calculation on the return on investment, Hamid said.
“If you close one deal because you use Glean it could justify the cost of buying that platform. So I’m always thinking in terms of, how do we think about the cost benefit analysis of it?” he said. Hamid declined to share how much it cost to use Glean. The sales team hasn’t yet closed any deals from the platform, he noted.
Time’s entire print archive of over 100 years is also available in Glean, which will eventually allow the editorial team to search for relevant topics and cite articles from the archive. It hasn’t been deployed yet, Hamid said.
Going forward, Hamid and his team are looking into taking components of the AI chat bar — which they created for its annual “Person of the Year” announcement last year, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT — and making them available across the rest of Time’s site, such as summarizing articles and translating stories into different languages, he said.
“To me, the potential for AI starts after the article has been published,” Hamid said.
https://digiday.com/?p=573496
