Tony Thomas is the Chief Technology Officer at Oneindia, with over two decades of experience building scalable, AI-powered platforms across media, video, and AdTech. Known for his expertise in engineering data-driven systems and leading high-performance tech teams, he brings a rare blend of innovation, precision, and strategic foresight to digital transformation.
In the interview, Tony spoke about designing adaptable AI systems for India’s diverse audiences, balancing automation with editorial judgment, and how intelligent technology can enhance creativity, trust, and user experience in digital publishing.
You’ve led the development of AI-powered platforms at Oneindia. How do you approach designing systems that are both scalable and adaptable to India’s highly diverse digital audience?
Years ago, we built our internal AI tool called WISE (Widely Intelligent Support Engine) with one clear goal – to make the lives of our writers and audience easier. I’ve always believed that technology should simplify things, not make them harder. The complexity should stay behind the scenes, while the experience for users should feel natural and effortless.
Oneindia’s biggest strength is our large and diverse language audience. That’s why we design every system with cultural and linguistic adaptability in mind. Our AI architecture uses modular, language-agnostic components that can handle massive amounts of region-specific content. Over time, we’ve learned a lot about how different audiences behave across India, and we use federated learning to keep improving our models based on those local patterns, without ever compromising privacy. On the user side, our adaptive design focuses not just on language, but also on tone, emotion, and behavior – making the technology scale to millions while still feeling personal.
Video and rich media consumption are growing rapidly. What strategies or technologies have you found most effective in ensuring seamless delivery across varied bandwidth conditions?
At Oneindia, we create and fine-tune content for everyone – from users watching 4K videos on large screens to those browsing short clips on a 2G connection. To maintain this consistency, our media delivery system is built around intelligent adaptability. Internally, we use an inhouse developed Video AI tool called One Point Uploader (OPU) that helps our content teams automatically convert videos into multiple formats suitable for different platforms and bandwidths, complete with curated metadata for each version.
Most of our video consumption happens through external platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, DailyMotion, X and many more. To stay effective, we rely on AI-driven tracking and analytics that study viewing behavior, watch time, platform-wise engagement, and RPM performance. These insights help our teams understand what content, format, and duration work best for each platform and audience type. The goal is simple – to deliver rich media experiences that look great everywhere, while helping creators work smarter with minimal effort and zero wastage.
AI and automation can accelerate content creation, but human judgment remains crucial. How do you strike the right balance between machine-driven insights and editorial oversight?
At Oneindia, we see AI not as a replacement for editors, but as a tool that strengthens their work. Automation helps us move faster – spotting trends, scheduling content, and creating first drafts – but the heart of journalism will always depend on human values like empathy, ethics, and judgment.
We follow a human-in-the-loop approach, where AI provides insights and our editors bring in context and cultural understanding. The machines take care of routine tasks like tagging, translation, and headline testing, while humans focus on what really matters – credibility, tone, and meaning.
We also go beyond measuring just reach or clicks. Our team tracks what we call “trust velocity” – how quickly and accurately verified information spreads. In short, AI at Oneindia helps us create smarter and faster, but people make sure it stays responsible, accurate, and human.
Integrating AdTech into a media platform often involves complex trade-offs. Can you share an example of a technical or operational challenge you navigated to optimize both engagement and revenue?
The biggest challenge in any media organization is balancing the needs of Revenue, AdTech, AdOps, SEO, editorial, and tech – it’s truly a constant tug of war. If ad placements or density aren’t optimized carefully, it can immediately impact Core Web Vitals (CWV) and lead to drops in search rankings and Discover traffic. Finding that balance is both a science and an art.
At Oneindia, one of our key challenges was aligning dynamic ad-insertion models with user engagement without breaking the reading flow. We solved this by building a context-aware ad-placement engine that uses NLP to detect natural pauses within articles and insert ads intelligently. On the backend, we unified multiple demand-side data sources into a single decision layer to improve yield without adding clutter. The key lesson is simple – optimization is not just about more ads, but about respecting user rhythm. When ad relevance enhances the story instead of interrupting it, engagement and revenue rise together.
With generative AI, predictive analytics, and other emerging technologies reshaping media, which do you believe will have the most transformative impact on Indian digital publishing in the next 3–5 years?
The future of digital publishing in India will be shaped by how well we combine AI, data, and human understanding. Generative AI will go beyond writing or creating visuals. It will help build complete storytelling experiences tailored to each reader. Predictive tools will not just guess what people want to read, but also understand why they want it.
At the same time, the way people “read” is already changing. More users will get information through AI-powered answer engines and interactive devices instead of visiting websites directly. But even these AI systems need authentic and verified content to stay credible. That’s where trusted publishers like us remain essential – to keep truth alive in an age of automation.
We’re also seeing early signs of a new model emerging where AI platforms collaborate with publishers and reward them for reliable content. As this evolves, and as video and short-form storytelling grow further, the future of media will be more intelligent, interactive, and rooted in trust.
Looking back at your time at Oneindia, which innovation or system you implemented had the most unexpected impact, and what key lesson did it teach you about leading technology in media?
Among all the systems we’ve built, WISE turned out to be the most transformative. What started as a support tool to help writers find and republish old stories quickly grew into something much bigger. It became the brain of our newsroom – connecting discovery, creation, and distribution in one intelligent flow.
WISE brought speed, clarity, and creative intelligence into every stage of content production. It didn’t just surface information; it helped our teams see patterns, recall context, and even spark new ideas. What surprised me most was how it changed the way people worked – freeing them from repetitive tasks and helping them focus on creativity and judgment.
The biggest lesson for me was that innovation isn’t always about control or complexity. It’s about building systems that make people think smarter, not just work faster. That belief continues to guide how we design technology at Oneindia today.
