New York Post launches "Hamilton" AI chatbot
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New York Post Media Group is launching a custom AI chatbot as part of a broader AI-powered personalized news experience called Hamilton, executives tell Axios.
The big picture: Publishers are turning to AI interfaces to keep readers engaged on their own platforms, as AI-driven changes eat away at search and social traffic referrals.
Driving the news: The new chatbot and suite of AI products is named after the paper's founder, Alexander Hamilton.
- The tools are meant to help readers discover more content and get more personalized and optimized recommendations, said Ariscielle Novicio, chief technology officer and senior vice president of product and digital strategy at New York Post Media Group.
- Beginning Tuesday, users will see Hamilton across the New York Post and California Post Android and iOS apps.
- Eventually, the company plans to expand Hamilton to its sites on the open web.
Zoom in: Hamilton is an umbrella brand for AI-powered personalization features, including chatbot "Hamilton Search," personalized news briefing "Post Express," recommendation engine "Picked For You" and commentary and analysis discovery tool "Post Voices."
- The tools pull current and archived editorial content from the New York Post and California Post newsrooms.
- Hamilton itself doesn't produce original content or make any editorial judgments based on that content.
How it works: The tools were built using Google Cloud infrastructure, including its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini models.
- The Post controls the editorial boundaries and product experience, while Google provides the underlying cloud infrastructure, models, search and recommendation capabilities, Novicio said.
- Google Cloud's tech automatically powers the backend infrastructure that ensures newly published articles can be ingested, indexed and made searchable for Hamilton within seconds.
- That makes it possible for users to receive hyper-personalized content recommendations whenever they open their apps.
While Google Cloud works with many publishers to power secure backend tech infrastructure, this is the first time it's worked with a news partner in North America to power an AI chatbot, per Michael Clark, president of Google Cloud, North America.
Between the lines: The arrangement is a standard enterprise cloud relationship, not a Google News partnership or an AI content-licensing agreement, per Novicio.
- The Post pays Google for its cloud technology, and the relationship is separate from the publisher's relationship with Google Search.
- While the Post's archive powers Hamilton, it is not licensing that content to train Google's general-purpose AI models through this agreement, Novicio confirmed.
Zoom out: The New York Post's parent company News Corp. has taken a dual approach to working with tech vendors in the AI era.
- While it's brokered lucrative licensing deals with companies willing to pay for its journalism, such as OpenAI and Meta, it's also taken legal action against companies like Perplexity that it accuses of using its content without permission.
What we're watching: More newsrooms are launching AI chat interfaces to improve engagement.
- The Washington Post was early in introducing an AI chatbot to its site in 2024.
- Time rolled out a chatbot later that year alongside its annual Person of the Year feature.
- Gannett/USA Today and The Independent have partnered with ad giant Taboola to build their own custom generative AI search engines trained on their proprietary journalism.
Go deeper: Media companies enter AI race with their own chatbots
