Mint and Google unite media leaders to redefine AI readiness

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future-facing promise for media organisations; it is already reshaping how enterprises operate, make decisions, and serve audiences. For today’s media leaders, the central question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to embed it meaningfully across business functions- HR, sales, marketing, finance, legal, and product-without compromising trust, talent, or human judgment.

These questions took centre stage at AI Matters: Transformation Dialogues in the News & Media Industry, an invite-only CXO workshop hosted by Mint in association with Google on December 16, 2025, at the Google Gurgaon office. Senior leaders from technology, data, finance, HR, marketing, and product functions gathered with a shared objective: to move beyond isolated pilots and reimagine what true AI readiness looks like at an organisational level.

Beyond treating AI as a productivity add-on or a tool upgrade, the conversations positioned it as a foundational enabler of enterprise-wide transformation-one that can unlock new ways of working, improve decision-making, strengthen monetisation, and enhance trust, but only when business functions actively embrace and integrate it into their people, processes, and culture.

Making sense of the signal

Opening the day, Durga Raghunath, Head of News Partnerships, India and AI Lead, APAC at Google, spoke to a challenge that extends well beyond newsrooms: information overload.

Across organisations, data volumes are exploding, compliance demands are increasing, and teams are under pressure to move faster with fewer resources. “We are drowning in signals,” she noted, adding that the real challenge today is not access to data, but the ability to extract relevance, context, and insight from it, across functions.

Raghunath highlighted how the next phase of AI adoption will be driven by agentic AI systems, tools that can plan, reason, and execute complex tasks rather than simply respond to prompts. She described how enterprise-grade AI systems such as Gemini, combined with grounded knowledge tools like NotebookLM, can help organisations connect external intelligence with internal data, enabling smarter workflows across marketing, sales, HR, and operations, without losing accuracy, accountability, or institutional memory.

Why digital growth keeps eroding value

The broader strategic context was set by Neeraj Sharma, Managing Director and APAC Media & Entertainment Lead at Accenture, who addressed a paradox familiar to many media leaders: digital scale does not automatically translate into digital value.

He described this phenomenon as “analogue rupees being traded for digital paise,” where reach expands but monetisation weakens. Sharma introduced Accenture’s Four-I Framework-Information, Insights, Interaction, and Intent-arguing that sustainable value creation begins when organisations move beyond volume-centric metrics and start aligning data, technology, and teams to serve high-intent audiences and business outcomes.

Data shared during the session highlighted a recurring pattern across industries. While experimentation with generative AI is widespread, only a small fraction of enterprises have successfully scaled AI into production. The root cause, Sharma noted, is not the technology itself, but organisational readiness - fragmented data foundations, unclear ownership, and misaligned operating models that drive up costs and delay time-to-value.

Leadership debate: where trust meets transformation

These realities were explored further during The Leadership Debate, moderated by Leslie D’Monte (author of AI Rising and Mint Tech Talk columnist), featuring Yudhvir Mor (Chief Product and Technology Officer, Bennett Coleman), Nagaraj Nagabushanam (Vice President, Data and Analytics & Designated AI Officer, The Hindu), and Arnav Mathur (Chief Digital Growth Officer, Zee Media)

The discussion deliberately moved beyond editorial use cases to examine how AI is being adopted across an organisation - from marketing analytics and revenue forecasting to operational reporting, compliance, and talent management. While panellists acknowledged that AI is already delivering efficiency gains by automating repetitive tasks, they cautioned that scale without structure can introduce new risks.

Trust, they agreed, must be engineered into systems from the outset through governance, accountability, and human oversight. Without clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and cross-functional alignment, AI initiatives risk becoming costly experiments rather than drivers of transformation.

Talent and culture emerged as equally critical. As AI reshapes workflows across departments, leaders emphasised the need to redesign roles, invest in reskilling, and manage change proactively. True transformation, they noted, depends as much on people and mindset as on models and infrastructure.

Scaling AI beyond pilots

In the final speaker session, Kapil Malhotra, Head of Customer Engineering at Google Cloud, addressed what it takes to scale AI across enterprises without fragmenting workflows or increasing complexity.

As foundation models become increasingly commoditised, Malhotra argued, differentiation will depend on how organisations operationalise AI-leveraging proprietary data, contextual intelligence, and strong governance. He highlighted how enterprise platforms like Gemini for Enterprise, built with security, privacy, and compliance at their core, can serve as a foundation for creating, deploying, and governing AI-powered workflows across functions, from newsroom operations and marketing to HR, finance, and legal.

Rather than adopting disconnected tools, Malhotra stressed the importance of unified platforms that allow organisations to build AI agents once and deploy them consistently across teams, enabling scale, speed, and trust simultaneously.

From ideas to action

The workshop concluded with Collaborative Roundtable Dialogues, a format that many participants described as a first-of-its-kind experience. For the first time, leaders from across competing media organisations and diverse functions sat together to openly discuss, debate, and co-create AI use cases in a highly collaborative setting.

Working across six themes-AI in workforce productivity, audience experience, revenue growth, trust, talent, and governance-the discussions were marked by candour, energy, and a shared sense of urgency, offering hands-on exercise and moving beyond theory to practical application.

Using the R.I.C.E. framework (Reach, Impact, Criticality, Effort), CXOs identified near-term AI initiatives that could be implemented within 60–90 days, alongside longer-term transformation bets. Use cases ranged from building single sources of truth and intent-driven audience journeys to automating recruitment workflows, strengthening compliance, and enabling smarter sales and marketing operations.

The day concluded with a live demonstration of NotebookLM synthesising inputs from across the speaker sessions and roundtables, offering a tangible glimpse into how grounded AI systems can support real-time collaboration and decision-making at an enterprise level.

A leadership moment for media organisations

The conversations at AI Matters reflected a shared understanding: AI adoption in media can no longer be confined to newsrooms or technology teams.

Its impact will be defined by how effectively organisations deploy AI tools and use cases across all business functions, aligning leadership, people, processes, and platforms around a common transformation agenda. True AI readiness will depend on leadership alignment, disciplined execution, and a clear commitment to trust and talent across the enterprise.

In that sense, AI is not replacing human judgment; it is shaping how effectively organisations can apply it at scale, across functions, and in the service of long-term value creation.

Note to the Reader: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of Mint.