Jeff Kofman

Jeff Kofman is the CEO and Founder of Trint, an AI application transcription/translation platform targeted at the news and media sectors used by global brands including The New York Times, Sky News and Airbnb. He started the business after three decades as a journalist reporting from around the world.

Before building Trint, Jeff spent more than 30 years reporting from over 40 countries for ABC, CBS, and CBC News. He covered many of the biggest stories of recent times including the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, Hurricane Katrina, the Chilean mine rescue and the fall of Muammar Gadhafi, winning two Emmys, a duPont Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. His work has taken him to the bottom of the ocean in a research sub, he has broken the speed of sound in an F-16, and visited a penguin colony in Patagonia. He’s been stationed in New York, Miami/Latin America and London, as well as reporting from all over the Americas, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Jeff was ABC News London Correspondent before pivoting his career to start Trint. He likes to say he has lived the workflow problem that Trint solves – he estimates he has manually typed thousands of hours of interviews, speeches, lectures and news conferences throughout his career. A role AI can now take on. Through a chance meeting with some software developers who had been experimenting with speech-to-text technology, Jeff saw an opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence to disrupt the tedious and time-consuming workflow of manual transcription. Trint’s speech-to-text platform adds a layer of software on top of the AI that allows users to quickly search, verify and correct the machine-generated text. Beginning as a team of four, Trint launched commercially after two years and in less than 10 years has grown to over 100, with offices in London and Toronto.

Drawing on his extraordinary career, Jeff reflects on leadership in many different contexts, as well as resilience, innovation, and considering how life in war zones prepared him for life in the world of tech start-ups. He shares lessons in leading through chaos, why adaptability matters more than ever, and how AI is reshaping everything from newsrooms to boardrooms. Alongside his work, Jeff undertook the epic Ride Across Britain cycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats – a 1,600km journey he completed in nine days that has its own hard-earned lessons in building resilience.

Jeff continues his work as a journalist. He is a global affairs analyst for BBC News, where he’s been a regular guest on Dateline London and several radio programmes. Jeff has also created and taught university programs in global journalism for American and Canadian students studying in London. He also launched a podcast, StoryTech, exploring how technology and innovation shape the way stories are told.