Cointelegraph's CEO is Leaving Crypto Media for the AI Industry
Yana Prikhodchenko, former CEO of Cointelegraph, has left the crypto media outlet after nearly five years to join Phase as co-founder and CEO.
After almost five years at Cointelegraph, Yana Prikhodchenko says she learned to tell the difference between a technology people use and a story the industry wants to believe. That experience helped persuade the former CEO to leave crypto media for artificial intelligence.
Prikhodchenko has joined Phase, a company developing infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, as co-founder and CEO. Her move reflects a bet that AI will reshape both how newsrooms work and how their reporting earns money.
AI in Newsrooms
Prikhodchenko said AI was already reducing the time spent on routine publishing work in media. Staff used it to monitor news feeds, find context in past articles, check copy, translate stories, and adapt reporting for video or social media.
These tasks used to take hours of manual work. With AI they take minutes.
She expects newsroom jobs to change as a result, although she argues that reporting and editorial decisions should remain with journalists. Media is largely pivoting to achieving referrals from LLMs like ChatGPT, which increased over 200% in a year.
New Revenue Models
Loyalty to a single media outlet is weakening as readers now pull information from multiple channels at once. Prikhodchenko sees a possible new customer for publishers: AI agents that purchase individual articles when they need information.
Using the x402 payment standard, an agent could request a story, pay in stablecoins, and receive it without signing up for a subscription. However, in the Reuters Institute's 2026 survey, only 20% of publisher respondents expected AI-related content deals to generate substantial revenue.
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