IPG Autumn Conference 2026
I attended the IPG Autumn Conference in London yesterday, and while it is still fresh in the mind, I wanted to write up some thoughts from the sessions I went to as a way of identifying the big themes of the day: international sales, productivity and AI.
The macro picture was a relatively positive one. In his opening address, IPG President Oliver Gadsby highlighted that the organisation’s publishers now account for over £2 billion of turnover—a significant contribution to the creative industries and the wider UK economy. But that figure was put in context by the morning keynote from BBC Economics Correspondent Dharshini David, who highlighted that the ten years since the Brexit referendum have seen trade with the EU underperforming, with small and medium-sized enterprises the most disadvantaged. That message was echoed in practical terms by EDItEUR’s Graham Bell, who talked later in the morning about issues with small parcel shipping to Europe and the end of de minimis exceptions. As a micro example of this barrier, I decided not to offer individual copy sales of my book outside the UK. Dharshini suggested that there is a drive in government to address this, which would be welcome, but it is hard not to think about the counterfactual: how much larger the independent sector might have been in 2026 without a disrupted decade of exports.
Dharshini also discussed productivity and the impact of AI, suggesting that the effects we’re seeing are largely from automation of processes rather than replacement of workers. That was reinforced by the startup CEO panel with Will Atkinson, Kate Parkin and Jamie Hodder-Williams all highlighting time and resource as critical constraints and talking openly about their use of AI as a solution, “operationally not generatively”, to use Kate’s neat phrase. A more extreme example of that came from Jeremy Weil of Colour Your Streets, who described running a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business with no coders and off-the-shelf tools and services.
Publisher use of AI also came through in the results of the IPG’s latest member research, presented by Dr Miriam Johnson of Oxford Brookes. The headline figure was that 76% of respondents reported using AI, up from 42%. The point that I was happiest to hear concerned governance: nearly three quarters of publishers reported having a formal policy on AI use, up from a third this time last year.
I chaired the afternoon session on AI, introducing Miriam and then the keynote from Dr Eleanor Drage, Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University and author of the newly published What If We Got AI Right? Eleanor’s presentation challenged the audience to reframe how we think about AI. I particularly liked her example of how the Financial Times rethought the use of AI in recruitment: instead of relying on it for prioritising applicants, they use it to review job postings to identify unconscious hiring bias. It’s similar to a concept that I talk about in my book, using AI to review primary research instruments to identify bias or structural problems before they are sent to human participants.
I also took part in an AI licensing panel chaired by Nicola Ramsey of Edinburgh University Press, alongside Tom West of Publishers’ Licensing Services. Fellow panellist Ritch Sibthorpe of Muwzo couldn’t join us in person but gave a great pre-recorded overview of the licensing market, including a breakdown of the main categories of content for AI licensing, skewed to academic and non-fiction. Thinking aloud, I wonder if the relative lack of trade content is partly explained by where AI platforms are focused, and partly by the fact that for some AI platforms, scanning physical trade books is cheaper and more straightforward than navigating publisher and author permissions, with the used market for trade books guaranteeing good availability. Tom gave an update on collective licensing for AI, and in my section, I mentioned that in recent discussions with DCMS, it has been really good to be able to point to collective licensing for book content as essentially a solved problem, at least on the supply side.
Later in the afternoon, Robin Fang from the bookselling startup Fox & Fable talked about discoverability of books in AI outputs. This has created an opportunity for new retailers to partner with publishers, but I can’t help thinking that the bigger takeaway is that publishers need to improve and own their metadata, especially around output-shaping categories like audience and citations. For example, Robin highlighted that the Audience Description field in ONIX was not populated in any of the 125,000 product records his bookshop has been sent by publishers.
The closing keynote was delivered by lexicographer Susie Dent, as a result of which I now know the word “vellichor”, the wistfulness of second-hand bookshops and the smell of old books.
Overall, it was another great programme from the IPG team, and one of the best-attended publishing conferences I can recall.