India Today is piloting Audipulse, an AI system designed to forecast audience engagement before stories go live. The tool analyzes past data to guide editors on timing, format, and content. Early results show higher prediction accuracy than manual methods.
India Today is experimenting with Audipulse, an AI-powered tool aimed at helping editors predict how stories will perform before publication. The initiative targets a key challenge in digital newsrooms: turning large volumes of engagement data into actionable editorial decisions that can drive traffic and audience loyalty.
Unlike traditional analytics dashboards that only reveal what worked after the fact, Audipulse analyzes previous engagement data and draft headlines to generate forward-looking recommendations. The system uses inputs from Chartbeat and Google Analytics, examining metrics such as clicks, time spent, story topics, and content formats—including text, video, and interactive stories.
Editors receive predictive signals on which stories are likely to perform well, along with suggested publishing times and formats. The AI model retrains itself by comparing its predictions with actual performance, aiming to improve over time. During a 15-day pilot, Audipulse achieved a 64 percent precision rate in predicting high-performing stories, compared to a 52 percent baseline from editors.
The project was developed in-house and deployed on local GPU infrastructure to address concerns about sending sensitive analytics data to external cloud environments. India Today joined the 2025 Newsroom AI Catalyst accelerator, run by WAN-IFRA in partnership with OpenAI, to support the experiment and share learnings with other publishers.
Project leads reported that adding contextual taxonomies—such as elections, cricket, and Bollywood—boosted prediction accuracy by 11 percentage points. However, they also noted that purely data-driven models struggled to capture deeper story context, requiring ongoing monitoring and manual refinement. Editorial skepticism was common early in the process, but side-by-side testing helped build trust in the system's recommendations.
Audipulse remains in development, with plans to expand its capabilities to video thumbnails and push alerts. The team is also working on an explainability layer to clarify the factors behind each prediction and considering a longer 30-day A/B test for further validation. For now, the focus remains on whether predictive AI can meaningfully support editorial decision-making in an algorithm-driven environment.
Founded in 1975, India Today is one of India's largest news media organizations, operating across television, digital, print, and video. Its digital newsroom covers a wide range of topics, including politics, entertainment, sports, business, and breaking news, reaching millions of readers and viewers nationwide.
