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A slightly shorter—and later—newsletter than normal, as I’ve been on the road this week (six webinars and courses in four days—welcome to new subscribers from those events). I started the week needing a productivity boost, and Google provided one…
Google is rolling out its Workspace Studio agent builder to business customers. It allows users to create AI agents that work with Google Mail, Calendar and Documents by describing a desired output to Gemini, or by tweaking one of the existing templates. For example, I built a reporting workflow to send out regular emails when a new file is saved to a folder in Google Drive—a couple of hours of monthly time-saving for a twenty-minute investment of time
If you use Google services, experimenting with this is a must-do. (There is also a Copilot equivalent if you are a Microsoft shop).
Google also released Nano Banana 2, its latest image generation model. This promises studio-quality images—maybe not print book quality, but absolutely on point for social media and marketing imagery. It’s a little thing, but I particularly liked that the announcement post provided the verbatim prompts used to generate the demo images…
Thanks to Matt Locke at Storythings for sharing this excellent taxonomy of AI applications: much of the critical commentary around AI remains impossibly broad, and this is an excellent framework for publishers to think more precisely about different types of AI—and the risks and opportunities each brings.
The Reuters Institute has a really interesting post on how AI is affecting freelance journalism, based on a survey of freelancers: what’s most interesting is that even while there are widely-held concerns about the impact of AI on employment, most writers are leaning into using it.
A group of major news publishers, including the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Sky, and the Telegraph have founded a new collective, Standards for Publishing Usage Rights (SPUR) to develop industry standards for how journalistic content is used by AI platforms. It’s worth asking what equivalent coordination would look like in books, which doesn’t have a happy track record for collective action.
Elsevier has launched a new AI search tool, LeapSpace, in partnership with other large academic publishers including Emerald, Sage, IOP and the New England Journal of Medicine. There’s a strong emphasis on citations and trust, and the cross-publisher approach is interesting—though some have already criticised it as a walled garden.
John Wiley announced the release of two new tools for discovery and accessibility of scholarly content: a summarisation tool and an AI companion which allows researchers to query content. This companion use case is becoming table stakes for reading system developers across academic and trade—the consumer equivalent is Kindle’s Ask this Book. How much control authors and publishers get within third-party reading systems is a key question.
I recently did some work for the children’s publisher B Small reviewing the content of their forthcoming book How to Understand and Apply AI, which is now available for pre-order. The team at B Small has done a fantastic job: explaining technical concepts to a bright 8–10-year-old in a balanced and accessible way is a pretty good stress test for one’s thinking. I feel very proud to have played a small part in the book, and if you have a little person in your life, it would be a great introduction to the topic.
If, like me, your children are now past the picture book stage, Pew Research Center just published a new report on how teenagers use AI. There are some good insights for educational and YA publishers, particularly around use of AI for search and summarisation. If teens increasingly treat AI as a first-stop search layer, that has obvious implications for discoverability and brand authority.
Finally, a few years ago, a really smart person told me that the only reason to do out-of-home advertising was if the creative treatment was so good people would photograph it and share it—the real audience isn’t the people who see it IRL, but the ‘secondary’ audience online. With that in mind, words to live by from The Economist:
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