Franco Piccato, executive director of Chequeado, presented Datilia and Nunchi at Media Party 2026: two artificial intelligence tools, one to put data in context and the other to listen to the community.
Franco Piccato, executive director of Chequeado, took the stage of the Gran Sala at Ciudad Cultural Konex on Thursday, October 29, to show how artificial intelligence can speed up fact-checking, as part of Media Party Buenos Aires 2026. His talk focused on two tools developed in-house: Datilia, to get to the evidence, and Nunchi, to listen to the community.
From question to evidence
Piccato explained that journalistic work follows a path that runs from a question to the search for evidence, and finally to a public answer. In Argentina and across Latin America, he warned, that path faces obstacles: access to information, the quality of available data and the transparency of public administrations. Sometimes the data exists, but it comes in an inaccessible format or with technical parameters that are hard to interpret.
Datilia: World Bank data at the service of the newsroom
To solve this, Chequeado created Datilia, whose prototype won the Data360 Global Challenge, the competition run by Media Party and the World Bank. Today it is used inside the newsroom, and the goal is to open it to all users. The mechanism is simple: you paste a text containing a claim, for example that youth unemployment has doubled, and the tool queries Data360, the World Bank’s database. It then returns indicators, a narrative summary and an interactive chart. Datilia can already be tested here.
Piccato stressed that the tool does not replace analysis. What it does is free up time so the team can interpret what the figures mean, and what can and cannot be stated. During the football World Cup, for example, Chequeado used it to compare participating countries, such as Argentina and Spain, on GDP per capita, inflation, public debt and infant mortality. Without the tool, that work would have taken much longer.
Piccato also went over the aspects the jury valued: its relevance, the use of natural language processing to translate numbers into human language, the cross-checking against verified data and its focus on Spanish, a language that is uncommon in technologies trained mostly in English. He also pointed to its potential for real-time use during speeches or electoral debates.
Nunchi: an agent that listens to the audience
The second tool deals with the questions that arrive after publication. Nunchi takes its name from a Korean philosophy that Piccato described as a form of empathy. It is an audience intelligence agent that reads comments on the website, Instagram and Facebook around the clock. It summarizes the conversation, analyzes the climate of opinion, sends real-time alerts to the newsroom via Slack and suggests actions, such as clarifying a figure or expanding a service piece.
Its dashboard shows comment volume, sentiment (analytical, critical, frustrated, hostile, ironic or positive) and contributions from the audience. According to Piccato, the tool saves 260 hours of human reading per month and helps detect errors so they can be corrected. It also surfaces people’s doubts, such as questions about the requirements for the Asignación Universal por Hijo, Argentina’s universal child allowance, which a journalist later answered on the website and in Instagram videos.
Human judgment, not replacement
To close, Piccato explained that these tools are designed by the innovation, product and newsroom teams working together, with the user at the center. “Technology does not replace human judgment, but it does give us a lot of superpowers,” he said. He proposed moving from journalism centered on attention to journalism centered on value: “a journalism that responds and serves its community.”
Read also: Marco Túlio Pires: no answer without its source
More stories on data journalism and fact-checking and the full Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 schedule.
From data to community: the conversation on AI and journalism continues at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026.
Through October 31 at Ciudad Cultural Konex, free admission. Join us here.
