Staff News From A.I. Initiatives

Hi,

I'm excited to announce new roles on the newsroom's A.I. Initiatives team.

Mukul Devichand has joined as editor, A.I. Initiatives. Mukul started earlier this month and immediately jumped into two new user-facing projects involving audio and search. He'll be the editorial lead on those and other projects that use A.I. for the benefit of readers - and listeners, which will be his focus to start, exploring new audio formats and features. He will serve as a key partner to our colleagues in Product and Technology who are working on A.I.-powered news experiences.

The new remit comes quite naturally to Mukul, who before joining The Times was the BBC's executive editor of voice and A.I. There he led a team of journalists and technologists experimenting with projects like an A.I. assistant and the BBC's presence on Alexa, which included launching 24/7 interactive audio newsrooms in multiple languages. Before that, he was a producer and editor in various parts of the BBC for nearly two decades, launching several successful sections and shows.

Mukul moved to New York to join The Times in 2021 and help launch the NYT Audio app, for which he led programming. Most recently, his team developed new features like Snippets that have deepened engagement with audio, and he was the editorial lead on the recent major redesign of the Listen tab in the core news app. With that transition complete, it was a natural time for Mukul to continue his innovative work as part of our team. He reports to me, and will continue to collaborate with his friends in Audio and other parts of the newsroom.

Dylan Freedman is promoted to A.I. projects editor, leading our work assisting reporters with research and investigations. From his first days on the team, Dylan has demonstrated the enormous potential in using A.I. to unlock stories hidden in massive and messy datasets. He eagerly seeks out colleagues, especially in the Washington bureau where he's based, to show what might be possible, and those collaborations have led to important stories before and after President Trump's re-election. Just look at Dylan's byline page for a sense of the range, including some great stories this year demystifying A.I.'s risks and limitations .

Along the way, Dylan has built tooling to make that kind of work more repeatable and accessible to more of the newsroom. He is the creator of our primary internal tool for analysis of text and multimedia that has helped with dozens of stories already and is quickly finding new users around the building. And he has shown how A.I. can be used responsibly as a reporting tool without sacrificing editorial judgment or adherence to the facts. All of that work will continue in his new role.

Dylan joined The Times last year from The Washington Post, where he was a principal software engineer. He began his career as a software engineer at Google before pivoting to journalism school at Stanford and becoming the lead developer for DocumentCloud. He has also taught data journalism at Temple University and the University of Maryland.

Please join me in congratulating Mukul and Dylan.

- Zach