The art of negotiating AI deals, according to Time COO Mark Howard

About a dozen deals have come across Mark Howard’s desk this year, and as Time’s chief operating officer, he’s had a unique role in participating in the negotiations with this ever-growing crop of companies.

Since the beginning of 2024, Time has struck deals with six artificial intelligence technology companies, including OpenAI, Perplexity and ProRata.ai, and the publisher is in the process of negotiating about a half dozen more, Howard said at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida, on Tuesday. And while he declined to share the names of the other companies the Time team has talked to, Howard said Time is “aggressively going forward with the negotiation” of deals at a time when many other media companies are more in a wait-and-see mode, or even pursuing litigation.

“[In] the negotiation part, of course, you have a much better position if you have the ability to also threaten litigation,” said Howard. But, “there’s a lot of opportunity by being more aggressive and really working together with these companies, as opposed to viewing them as an existential threat to the publishing world.”

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