Deccan Herald Launches AI-Powered Infographic Tool to Turn Articles into Instant Visual Summaries in CMS

Deccan Herald has introduced a CMS-integrated AI infographic tool that transforms articles into visual summaries with a single click, reducing the time required to create structured content from 10 minutes to one minute.

Development and Integration

The tool was developed after Deccan Herald joined the 2025 edition of Newsroom AI Catalyst, a WAN-IFRA accelerator programme in partnership with OpenAI that supports news publishers with their strategic AI initiatives. The initiative aimed to address dual constraints: audience demand for easily consumable content and editorial teams’ limited bandwidth to produce alternative formats manually.

Founded in 1948, Deccan Herald is part of The Printers (Mysore) Private Limited, which publishes both Deccan Herald (English) and Prajavani (Kannada). The publications have a strong presence in Karnataka and a growing digital audience, covering politics, business, civic issues, and culture with increasing emphasis on digital formats and audience engagement.

How the Tool Works

Editors finalise an article with hero image and content, then click a ‘Create Infographic’ button embedded in the CMS. The AI extracts key points and populates predefined HTML templates, allowing editors to review, edit, or regenerate the output before publishing. The final infographic is copied to clipboard for pasting into the CMS embed box.

The team initially tested a one-shot HTML generator but shifted to using fixed templates with AI limited to populating variables, improving consistency and controlling token costs. The extension was built using AI without additional engineering bandwidth, reflecting a product-led development approach.

Adoption and Impact

The tool is currently used in about 5 percent of articles, with editorial teams deciding where to apply it. While still early in adoption, it has significantly reduced the effort required to create structured summaries, shifting the task from manual formatting to quick review and editing.

“Ordinarily, if the team had to create this themselves from scratch, it would take about 10 minutes. With the tool, editing takes only about a minute,” said Suhas Bhandari, Product Manager, Deccan Herald.

Editorial Control and Flexibility

A key learning was that asking the AI to generate full HTML structures proved costly and unreliable. Using predefined templates with AI-generated content in defined fields delivered more consistent results. The system maintains editorial control, with teams reviewing and editing every AI-created infographic and managing the AI prompts to ensure accuracy.

Visual summaries are designed to complement, not replace, full articles, serving as an entry point for readers with limited time. The format adapts to story type: bullet points for general stories, numbering for how-tos, timelines for event mapping, and side-by-side comparisons for comparative pieces, with bullet points being the most common output.

Future Developments

The next phase will focus on scaling usage and refining the tool based on real-world performance, including analysing engagement differences between articles with and without infographic embeds. The team also plans to expand functionality within the CMS extension to allow more flexible use of existing templates and explore adjacent use cases such as social media carousels, visual stories, and listicles.