myKhel, a leading digital sports portal, is an offshoot of OneIndia, which is one of the oldest and largest multilingual digital news portals in India. Operating in the high-octane world of sports journalism, the agency faced a significant bottleneck: the sheer volume and complexity of real-time cricket data. While the agency had access to extensive databases, the process of number crunching was labour-intensive and restricted to a few specialised writers.

The social media team, in particular, struggled to find and visualise statistics quickly during high-pressure events like the World Cup. Without a dedicated graphics team for the sports desk, many data-rich stories remained text-only, failing to capture the attention of a younger, visual-first audience. The newsroom needed a way to simplify complex data and generate ready-to-publish visual assets at the speed of breaking news.

In 2025, Avinash Sharma, Sports Editor at myKhel participated in Google News Initiative’s AI Skills Academy, conducted in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and How India Lives. Despite having no knowledge of coding, the sessions gave him the confidence to build custom solutions using vibe coding.

He developed CricVerse, a cricket-focussed app built using Gemini AI Studio that serves as a one-stop solution for the newsroom. The app features six distinct AI personas – including a ‘Data Analyst’ for statistics and a ‘Creative Specialist’ for social media content – allowing users to simply prompt for player comparisons, trivia, and infographics. By integrating myKhel’s own databases with reliable cricket data sources, the tool provides real-time, accurate data in a concise format.

Beyond data analytics, Avinash developed Gemini Comic Factory, an AI-powered visual storytelling app built using Google AI Studio and Gemini. Designed to strengthen myKhel’s presence on social media, the generator converts text stories done by the newsroom into a series of editable comic panels, complete with images, captions, and speech bubbles. The tool produces both Hindi and English versions instantly, allowing the newsroom to bypass the slow, manual process of traditional design. With features to replace images, adjust text, and select templates, the team can now customise creative visual stories on the go, significantly reducing their reliance on external designers.

The integration of these AI tools has fundamentally shifted the newsroom’s workflow, moving from manual labour to creative oversight: