Did you find this post easily? We hope so. Because in today’s overflowing internet, finding useful, relevant content online is tricky. Getting it to the right audience is even more so. Newsweek, a global digital publisher, hit this exact wall. Their journey has recently been featured in a Google Cloud case study, showing how they’re leveraging artificial intelligence to break through, and how Zazmic, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, together with Google, assisted Newsweek in implementing state-of-the-art solutions that tremendously boosted their content reach and user engagement.
The Great Content Deluge
“In the legacy media industry, trust is your biggest value,” says Bharat Krish, Newsweek’s Chief Product Officer, on Zazmic’s recent AI & Beyond for Business podcast. Newsweek has been the hallmark of journalism for over 90 years, committed to fair, independent, and transparent newsmaking. Today, it reaches over 100 million readers around the globe monthly. That’s a massive amount of articles, graphics, and videos to create, translate, and distribute. But as Krish adds, “content is so ubiquitous now that it’s really hard to figure out what’s factual information, what’s not, what’s objective, what’s not, what do we trust, what do we not trust.”
This daily deluge of content from millions of businesses and bloggers makes it tough for users to find objective information from a trustworthy source, unless they are very intentional. “You can easily direct a few people to the content you produce. How do you scale that for millions? Is it even possible?” asks Krish. To stay competitive in this space, companies need to cut through the clutter and maintain online visibility for their target audience cost-effectively and efficiently. Krish believes it takes a shift from digital-first to AI-first mindset.
For Newsweek, the shift has already started.
Content + Data + AI: Newsweek’s Winning Formula
With a vast archive like Newsweek’s, the main problem was content searchability and discoverability. Keyword searches were ineffective: typos threw off results, and the system couldn’t adapt to context or offer up relevant related reads. Newsweek’s team saw the answer in building AI-powered search that would understand natural language and personalize the experience for users. They identified clear goals to boost engagement and satisfaction:
- Delivering a smooth, frustration-free search experience;
- Simplifying navigation so readers find more relevant content and stay longer;
- Creating a clear, easy path from engaged reader to paying subscriber;
- Gaining actionable insights into reader intent and interests.
Since for many in the media industry, artificial intelligence is still uncharted territory, Newsweek turned to Google and Zazmic to quickly ‘short-circuit’ their need for AI expertise. Together, we created a proof of concept for a cost-effective Vertex AI search and translation engine for the Newsweek website in less than a month.
How We Built the AI Engine
The AI-powered search engine for Newsweek was built using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search and Gemini. This setup makes Newsweek’s content instantly accessible, in multiple languages.
Vertex AI makes the engine understand natural language queries, even if there are spelling mistakes, and interpret user intent more accurately to provide highly relevant results – which are presented chronologically with summaries, a list of trending queries, and recommendations for related content.
Thanks to Gemini, search results can be instantly translated into Portuguese, Mandarin, French, Spanish, German, or Hindi. This makes the reader’s experience more personal and greatly expands Newsweek’s audience.
Here’s how we did it:
- Kickoff & Understanding Data – The team began with an in-depth workshop to define the project’s scope, goals, and data requirements. This phase helped Zazmic understand Newsweek’s needs, assess the available data, and identify any gaps that might need to be addressed.
- AI MVP Design – The Zazmic team developed a comprehensive technical blueprint for the AI-powered search system. This phase involved mapping out the system architecture, identifying the AI tools to be used, and defining how the system would interact with Newsweek’s existing infrastructure.
- AI MVP Implementation – With the blueprint in hand, Zazmic moved into the development stage, where we built and deployed the first version of the AI-powered search system. This MVP included core functionalities like content indexing, AI-driven search results, and the ability to scale with Newsweek’s large content library.
- MVP Demo & Customer Showcase – The new search capabilities were demoed to the Newsweek’s stakeholders to give them a clear understanding of how the solution would enhance their content discovery process and would improve new user acquisition and current user retention.
- Production Recommendation – Following the successful MVP, Zazmic provided Newsweek with a strategic plan for fully deploying the AI search solution. This plan included recommendations on infrastructure enhancements, security measures, and final tweaks needed to optimize performance.
- Knowledge Transfer – To ensure Newsweek’s team could manage and maintain the AI-powered search system, we conducted a knowledge transfer session. This included sharing best practices for system use and maintenance, as well as providing insights into the implementation process.
Thrilling AI Transformation in Numbers
This project delivered clear and incredibly impressive results for Newsweek:
- Users find relevant content faster and more accurately, customized to their preferences.
- People stay on the site longer. Monthly onsite searches skyrocketed from 30,000 to 500,000!
- Website visits soared to over 100 million per month – roughly double from a year ago.
- Article recirculation jumped by 30% thanks to the new recommendation engine.
- The system handles 75,000 translation requests per week with Gemini. This significantly expands Newsweek’s audience.
- Newsweek gains accurate and actionable data on user behavior, helping them refine content strategy.
As Yann Kronberg, Zazmic’s Founder and CTO, noted for Google Cloud’s Newsweek story: “Newsweek’s new search functionality is about more than just metrics… Those metrics represent a thrilling transformation of how Newsweek’s readers experience news.”
Conclusion
Zazmic’s collaboration with Newsweek moves forward. We keep working on new features that will enable the company to reach their audience effectively and keep them at the forefront of media innovation.
Newsweek’s CPO Bharat Krish is truly optimistic about the company’s continued transformation. “We see the vast potential of AI to reach out to millions of people with our content in a fashion that they like, in a medium that they like, and personalizing it for their needs,” he shares. “Beyond that, it empowers our staff to generate more content, better content, at the scale and quality required by modern content production. The opportunities are vast, and we’re just getting started.”
The success of this project was made possible through the close collaboration of AI Specialist Ambika Sharma, Zazmic Founder Yann Kronberg, and Newsweek CPO Bharat Krish. Each brought unique expertise and vision to the table, playing a key role in turning this innovative idea into a real business win.
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