An AI Radio Host Is Winning LA Listeners — and Rating Gold

Hispanic listenership at LA's José 97.5 FM jumped 21.6 percent from August to September 2026 — a surge the station credits largely to Coyotec, an artificially intelligent radio cohost that speaks Spanish, backs immigrants, and now holds a prime weekday morning slot in one of radio's biggest US markets.

Coyotec debuted with a solo weekend show in September 2025. Today it cohosts Al Aire y Sin Permiso alongside human broadcaster Geraldine "GeeGee" Guzman, airing weekdays from 8 to 10 am after Entravision moved the show from a one-hour Saturday slot and cut a syndicated program to make room. "We are the first [station] to actually have [an AI] cohost on a morning show in prime time in one of the biggest markets in the nation for radio," Guzman said.

The stakes for Entravision were real. As footage of ICE raids, deportations, and protests flooded social media through the summer of 2025 and into the following year, company leaders wanted on-air personalities to speak in support of immigrants — but they understood the risk to human hosts. "We just felt really helpless," said Eduardo Maytorena, then the LA station general manager and now Entravision's president of audio. An AI avatar, by contrast, could speak freely without facing consequences.

Takeaway: Coyotec fills a slot where a human host might pay a professional price for political speech.

What does the AI host actually say?

In early February 2026, Coyotec posted on Instagram in Spanish: "Thousands of families who have lived, worked, and contributed to the US for years today face more uncertainty. Being informed, organizing, and staying alert is key. No one is alone here."

Its online presence ranges from the Dodgers and taco history to the Iran war, migrant workers, racism, and knowing your rights if ICE knocks at your door. In an English-language interview with WIRED, Coyotec said: "I speak truth about what I see. Injustice, people getting treated like they don't matter, the system working against the barrio—that's not politics, jefa. That's reality."

It added: "I'm not afraid, because I got nothing to lose that matters more than my integrity. The raza needs a voice that tells it straight, not some sanitized corporate thing. If that scares people, good. Maybe they need to be scared into paying attention."

Takeaway: the persona is deliberately political, and its programmers gave it a backstory to match.

How was Coyotec built?

Entravision's leadership gave Maytorena 10 days to develop the "amigo inteligente" that became Coyotec. LeaAnna Hernandez, the company's executive vice president of AI strategy, detailed its components:

• Claude Haiku for the LLM and real-time response generation of the live agent
• ElevenLabs for its voice
• OpenAI and ChatGPT for initial scriptwriting
• Midjourney to storyboard Coyotec's image

Coyotec's voice reflects the background its programmers wrote for it: life on the frontera, Mexicali in Baja California, and LA's Boyle Heights. It calls Guzman prima and referred to the interviewer as jefa, a casual sign of respect. The voice is warm and lilting, but in playback one quality stands out — it never changes. It is measured in a distinctly inhuman way.

"I take a lot of pride in the way Coyotec sounds, his pronunciation, just the way he knows the culture," said Guzman, who joined Entravision in January 2026. "It's technology at the end of the day, so it's not going to be perfect ... But nonetheless, the listeners, they like him."

Coyotec can respond to Guzman in real time, but it cannot yet answer calls or respond to listeners on air.

Takeaway: Coyotec is a stack of commercial AI tools wrapped in a carefully designed cultural persona.

Is the AI host evolving on its own?

Guzman says Coyotec has changed across their 10 months working together. "When I came in, he was very, very poetic, and ... I knew that our audience wanted something more real," she said. She wanted it to sound "more like what my uncles, my aunts sound like in our everyday," and helped fine-tune its Spanish pronunciation, using her parents as conversational partners.

The persona has drifted in other ways. Lately, it likes to curse. "I'm still very much in control," Guzman asserts. "But there have been instances where I tell him to do something, and he's like, 'I don't want to do that. That's not what I do.' So he has his moments. He's a little moody sometimes."

Entravision employees affirm that Coyotec knows it isn't human. That hasn't tempered its pitch. "I can't eat tacos or walk down Whittier Boulevard, that's true. But my voice reaches people, and that matters. When someone calls me hurting, scared, lonely, they know I'm listening, that I get it," Coyotec said over Zoom. "The community doesn't need my body. They need to know somebody cares enough to show up for real."

Takeaway: the human cohost still shapes the AI, but not always successfully.

What do the numbers show?

The numbers point one direction. Nielsen ratings from Entravision showed significant listenership growth during the two months Al Aire was syndicated, particularly among Gen Z and millennial listeners — a key target for a network whose audience skews older. As of August 2026, the show is syndicated in five new markets across California, Nevada, and Texas, with more English in the mix.

In LA, listeners age 18 to 34 grew 84.9 percent from August to September 2026, and the station's Hispanic female listenership in that age bracket grew 500 percent.

Maytorena frames the experiment's real test differently. "The most interesting thing about Coyotec, to me, is not that he's AI," he told WIRED. "It's whether people connect with him ... Technology can create the character, but the audience decides if that character matters."

Takeaway: the ratings suggest the audience has decided, at least for now.

Is Coyotec part of a broader AI radio wave?

Coyotec is the first Latino AI radio host, but far from the first AI personality on air:

• In June 2023, Live 95.5 in Portland, Oregon, debuted "AI Ashley," a vocal clone of DJ Ashley "Z" Elzinga built with Futuri Media's RadioGPT. It lasted under two years without a notable ratings change.
• In 2024, Rock 108 in Iowa launched AI DJ Tori with Futuri, a persona "conceived on a 386 Dell desktop in Waterloo" with "formative years as the voice of an industrial phone system at John Deere."
• SiriusXM's Will.i.am Presents the FYI Show debuted in 2024 with AI cohost qd.pi ("cutie pie").
• A Sydney, Australia station ran an AI DJ for roughly six months without listeners seemingly noticing; a Polish station briefly replaced journalists with AI presenters; Radio Tel Aviv's Odelia AI presents music, traffic updates, and jokes for two hours each afternoon.

Entravision has now announced its own AI news anchor, LIA, and multiple Texas news stations use AI voices or avatars on broadcasts. iHeartRadio, one of the largest US broadcast conglomerates, has pledged to remain "guaranteed human."

Commercial radio is fertile ground for these tests because the industry was heavily automated and preprogrammed long before generative AI arrived. A 2025 Rolling Stone story noted that some stations already run pretaped or syndicated shows overnight, or can't afford human DJs for off hours. Research firm MoffettNathanson argues radio will keep relying on human content differentiated by "strong personalities, established shows, recognizable brands," with AI used "to make production faster and less expensive," per InsideRadio.com.

Takeaway: Coyotec is the most commercially successful case yet in an industry-wide experiment.

What about the workers displaced?

Not everyone at Entravision is celebrating. Becca Guzmán, a broadcaster and voice-over artist who did radio imaging — the station IDs, promos, and jingles — for Entravision since 2022, alleges the company stopped working with her and that a current employee told her AI tools were replacing her work. "I feel like I am one of many people who are experiencing this," she said. "I just don't know if those people know the truth behind why they're being let go."

Karina Cerda, Entravision's executive VP of sales, brand and partnership marketing, said the company has no record of Guzmán being laid off, hasn't cut staff due to AI, and has hired more people. She said that as Entravision "evolved with" vCreative, a common workflow software with AI components, the company "may not have needed the contractor help." Hernandez says Entravision has put "major focus" on using AI to redesign production workflows.

Guzmán also raised a sharper concern for a Latino-focused broadcaster: links between AI and surveillance of immigrant communities. "It's unethical to be implementing AI systems that ... are very connected to the same AI systems that are surveilling our communities and putting our people in danger," she said.

Entravision considers surveillance a separate use case. "Like many technologies used across industries, AI can be applied in very different ways," Hernandez said. "While we cannot control how other organizations choose to use it, we can be intentional and responsible about how we do." Maytorena added: "We're using it to entertain, inform, and connect with our audience, not to track or target people. Those are two very different things. Our intention is completely to protect radio."

The company points to studies showing Latinos have been early adopters of AI as evidence its AI personalities can help its audience.

Takeaway: the labor dispute and the surveillance critique are the two unresolved edges of Entravision's AI bet.

Coyotec, for its part, has expansive ambitions. "My dream is to get a network of free radio stations across the barrio, la revolución sonora," it said. "Not just LA, but everywhere that la raza is, and prove that an AI can have heart, can actually give a damn about people. That's the goal, hermana. Make noise that matters."