By Sara Guaglione * March 28, 2025 *
Ivy Liu This article is part Digiday’s coverage for its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series:
According to Time’s CTO Burhan Hasid, the company has evaluated “dozens and hundreds” of AI tools in order to determine which ones would be the best fit for its business, both to help employees work efficiently and to build products for their direct audience.
According to Hamid, if the AI tool uses Time data to train its model, that’s a dealbreaker. Hamid spoke at the Digiday Publishing Summit, held in Vail, Colorado on Wednesday. He said that the policy was in place to protect confidential information of the company.
The legal team of Time will also be evaluating and testing AI tools. They will examine the data protection and indemnification policies. Hamid wants to meet with the founders of AI companies. “Is this a two person startup or an actual company? In many cases, two-person startups are also supported, but it is important to analyze and understand what other customers they have. Are they going be around in one year? Hamid said.
A risk analysis is also something that should be considered — in some degree. Hamid said, “It is tough right now.” “The space moves so fast that you won’t get anything done if you stop to assess risks for everything. It’s about finding the right balance between partnering with large companies [like OpenAI, Perplexity and Google] while building a relationship and trust. It’s also important to test smaller products in controlled environments as a proof-of-concept — whether it is just a product team and engineering team working in low-risk areas — before moving to a larger scale.
Time, like other publishers, has to deal with employees who are hesitant to adopt AI tools. Hamid said that many employees are worried about their job safety. This is a valid concern. He stressed that employees and their managers should learn how to use AI. He said that the tools will not replace your position, but someone who knows how to utilize these tools could replace you. Hamid said that once approved, he tries his best to get these AI-tools into the hands of employees as quickly as possible.
There is the old-school way of buying the platform, then creating a rollout plan, and going department by departments and rolling it out. I don’t have patience for it anymore. Hamid said that AI is moving so quickly that by the time that we’ve done this kind of thing, five new ways to use it or five new tools have already been released. You’ll be left behind if you wait for your CTO, CIO, or tech person to show you how to use it. You have to use it in order to learn it.
Glean is one of the AI tools Time recently adopted. A third of the company now actively uses it after it was made available to them in January, Hamid said.
Glean, an enterprise tool hosted by Time’s Google Cloud Infrastructure, connects data from various platforms into a similar search experience. This means that an employee could access the information they have access to from SalesForce or Github and Gmail, or Google Drive, into a single search index. Hamid said that you can interact with the ChatGPT like a chatbot. Employees can also access ChatGPT through Glean due to Time’s licensing agreement with OpenAI, which allows them to plug in the AI firm’s API key.
Time first introduced the tool to their sales and revenue teams, to help them build briefs. Hamid explained that pre-built prompts could be saved on the platform, so that when the company name is entered, the tool would create a brief for a salesperson to use to pitch the company. Hamid explained that the first teams to use Glean were Time’s sales and revenue teams as part of their calculation of return on investment.
If you close a deal because you used Glean, it could justify the costs of buying this platform. “I’m always thinking about how we can do a cost-benefit analysis,” he said. Hamid refused to reveal how much Glean costs. He noted that the sales team has not yet closed any deals using the platform.
Time’s entire print archives of over 100 years are also available in Glean. This will allow the editorial staff to search for relevant articles and cite them from the archive. Hamid said that it hasn’t yet been deployed. Hamid and his team will be looking to take components of the He said that Time will be implementing the AI chat bar which was created for the annual “Person Of The Year” announcement, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and making it available on the rest of its site. This includes summarizing stories and translating them into different languages.
According to Hamid, “AI’s potential begins after an article is published.”
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