Happy Friday. I’m catching up after a week on the road and there is a lot to process. This week my reading and thinking clustered around two themes: what happens when the cost of producing content falls, and whether that cost will be stable over time.

I’ve been leading training sessions on generative AI for nearly three years now, and over that time the advice that I’ve given on prompting has been relatively consistent: good results generally depend on a degree of detail and specificity about context, objective, and outputs. I was interested to see Ethan Mollick noting a change of emphasis in the developer documentation for GPT-5.5, OpenAI’s latest thinking model:

I’m writing this on the way home from Chicago, where I gave a keynote on AI and publishing at the ECPA Leadership Summit. As I said in my presentation, this is not an area of publishing I’ve worked in, and my role was to provide an outside perspective—less about the specifics of the sector, more about what AI might look like when viewed from beyond it. It was a really rewarding and thought-provoking experience, and I am very grateful to Jeff Crosby and his colleagues at the ECPA for their hospitality.

It’s been a big couple of weeks for AI image generation and design tools: with major updates from Canva, Google and Anthropic, users are spoiled for choice. The new tools speak to a trend I’m increasingly seeing—and write about below: the baseline for AI use is shifting from competent prompting to confidently delegating to agents. The exam question for publishers is getting used to managing systems of agents rather than using individual tools.

It has been a busy week: updating the materials for and delivering a lunch-and-learn session and another full day training course on AI for IPG members, and preparing a keynote presentation on the future of publishing for a conference in Chicago next week. To prepare for those things, I’ve been reading and talking to a lot of interesting people about how they are using AI at the moment. In between, I made a quick dash up to London for my ten year business school reunion—a room full of smart people from different industries who provide a triangulation to the publishing experience. There are three interesting patterns that kept coming up in all of those different contexts.

A slightly shorter newsletter than last time as it’s been a particularly busy week: several days of travel, and submitting the manuscript of my book to my publisher. More on that soon, but first, some perspectives on AI impact.

If you read my piece last year on sizing and plotting the UK publishing industry based on Companies House data, there’s an interesting coda today with the publication of the Office for National Statistics’ updated Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes for 2026. If you’re not familiar with what SIC codes are, you’ve probably given up reading by now—but the short version is that SIC codes are short numbers that describe what business activities companies engage in. Firms choose one or more SIC codes when they register with Companies House.

I don’t set out with a particular theme in mind for each week’s newsletter: sometimes the things I’ve found in my research cluster serendipitously around a particular area, and more often there’s a range of themes. As it happens, this has turned out to be Use Case Week: practical ideas from Anthropic, the BMJ, consultants Fathm, and Paul Ford. If you can’t find something practical to try as a result of this week’s newsletter, you can have your money back.*