Case Study

Lenfest AI Fellow spotlight: Rajesh Barade

The Seattle Times

October 19, 2026

This profile is part of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program’s 2026 Impact Report.

As an AI Fellow at The Seattle Times, Rajesh Barade is building practical AI solutions across advertising and other teams while helping staff explore and experiment with AI.

Many in the industry see AI as disrupting the work people do today. Rajesh sees it a little differently. While AI may initially automate some human tasks, he believes it will also create new roles and opportunities for people. He draws a parallel with computers: Before computers became part of our everyday lives, it would have been hard to imagine many of the roles and jobs that exist today because of them.

About his role and the problem he is trying to solve

Rajesh describes himself as “a techie who always liked to build solutions hands-on,” with a career spanning over two decades in technology and financial services.

He characterizes his role at The Seattle Times as “a kind of forward-deployed engineer before that term was coined.” His goal is to run useful AI experiments and be present to assist colleagues when someone needs help with AI.

Instead of solving a single, tightly defined problem, he works as an internal consultant across teams.

For the advertising team, Rajesh has built:

A lead-generation custom GPT-style agent to support prospecting, now being adapted and shared with other organizations in the Lenfest AI Collaborative cohort.
A set of copilots over SharePoint and internal data, which he envisions evolving into a collection of reusable “skills” that advertising teams across news organizations can adopt and customize.

The biggest surprise during the fellowship

Rajesh has been struck by the gap between the scale of the AI shift and its potential applications in many areas of the organization.

He hears deep concern about existential threats such as zero-click search and new AI-enabled competitors. He believes AI adoption across news media organizations will catch up with shifting industry trends, and he sees emerging chat and voice channels as new ways to reach audiences.

The advertising side of the business has been the forerunner in AI adoption, with teams that clearly understand how AI is disrupting their work and are moving quickly.

One lesson from his work that other newsrooms could apply tomorrow

Rajesh believes AI belongs in every employee’s toolkit, and not only inside centralized, bespoke applications.

“AI is a productivity tool that has to be on our desktop, and we must be comfortable using it. When somebody in your industry is using that to run 10 times faster, if you’re not using it, you are left far behind,” he said.

He has been running a pilot with Claude for some non-technical team members, who are now building tools on their own.

The key, he said, is to help people turn experiments into repeatable, ROI-positive workflows – for example, using Claude Cowork or ChatGPT to design small, reusable skills for routine tasks, and making sure the token spend is paid back as meaningful time saved.

What he is paying attention to right now

Rajesh is focused on the engineering discipline around agents – how to build robust, monitorable harnesses around LLMs so they behave reliably in production.

He has been advocating for agents for months now. For him, the frontier is not just clever prompts, but observable, governed agentic systems that organizations can trust over time.

The Fast Three

A book, article, or newsletter you’d recommend?
Neuron Daily, a newsletter he relies on to keep up with AI developments.

What’s one thing you’re learning that has nothing to do with AI?
Improving his chess.

One word that describes the next year of AI in news?
Voice, an upgrade from the chat channel – “the convergence of memory, personalization and speech interfaces.”