I was invited to deliver a short webinar today for the Swedish Publishers Association and its international affiliates. It was great to see a very strong turnout and thank you to my hosts for arranging it. I talked about recent trends in AI, how publishers are approaching it, and examples of how AI tools are being used.

Thanks to Graham Bell from EDItEUR for inviting me to speak at the 45th International Supply Chain Seminar in Frankfurt this afternoon, to update the AI presentation I gave last year. Giving an update meant less time on first principles, and it was a really interesting prompt to step back, compare this year’s slides with the 2023 deck and see what had changed. Of course, massive development on the technology side, more legal uncertainty, and greater awareness of the environmental impact of AI. But some points, like the importance of keeping human decision makers in the loop, are perennial.

I gave a short presentation on how publishers are using AI at the Society of Indexers Conference today. It was great to give the publisher perspective ahead of a fascinating presentation from Tanya Izzard on experimenting with LLMs for indexing: the mix of general and specific themes led into a lively discussion.

Thanks very much to the team at BookNet Canada for inviting me to speak at their Tech Forum webinar this evening on the elements of a balanced and ethical AI strategy for publishers. It’s hard to do justice to such an expansive topic in a forty minute presentation, but I discussed a number of key aspects including the pace of change and capability overhang in AI, copyright and Fair Use, accuracy, provenance, the environmental impact of AI and its increasing integration with all elements of the publishing application stack.

I don’t use TikTok, but it has been hard to escape its impact on the publishing industry, where I spent the first part of my career. Nielsen research suggests that one in four UK book buyers used TikTok in 2022, accounting for 90 million purchases. As a collective phenomenon, BookTok was awarded the person of the year award at last year’s Futurebook conference. In the meantime, there’s little doubt that the platform has a huge impact on commissioning, marketing and selling books, and that publishers are investing time and money to make the most of that. As a proxy for the level of interest, a search on the Bookseller magazine’s website this morning showed eighty nine search results for ‘TikTok’ for stories published in the first quarter of the year, versus four results for ‘GPT’. (Long term, I know which one I would bet on being most significant and transformative, but that’s another story.)

It’s the start of a new academic year, and I’ve been thinking a lot about volatility and uncertainty. Developing strategy in an uncertain context is the challenge underlying my current research on games and scenario planning. But even without that focus, just looking at the world around me this summer brought the subject home. Many of my clients experienced disruption to supply chains and operations during the Covid-19 pandemic; most are now contending with serious inflationary impacts. My current projects involve business partners on five continents, and talking to them, some level of political instability is a consistent theme. Even going on a family holiday, our first time out of the UK in two and a half years, raised uncomfortable questions about the state of world and sustainability, as we travelled against the backdrop of heatwaves and wildfires at home and devastating floods overseas.

This piece was commissioned by James McConnachie and first published in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors. It is reprinted with their permission.

I started a new project this week, doing a piece of business modelling for a client considering a new venture. As a result it was quite a different week to normal: very few Zooms or calls, and several days of intensely focused time researching and sorting the data I could find on the subject and building the first version of the model in Excel. Then testing the logic with a known set of data, before building a set of possible scenarios (base case, downside, upside) and running the model past a couple of senior stakeholders at the client for some useful feedback. Next week I’ll be working on improvements to the basic model.