Q: How are you using AI in your business now?
A: Our current AI usage falls into three main areas: internal process efficiency, enhancing existing products, and new product development.
Process efficiency: Like many publishers, process efficiency is probably the most regular area of use, with lots of small time-saving use cases occurring to varying degrees across the company and AI starting to be built into some of the standard tools we use. Meeting and call notes are probably the biggest time saver across the board.
Some of our sales teams have structured call notes automatically saved to Salesforce and for calls that have a common theme, we’re looking at using that to generate draft follow-up emails or proposals to save admin time.
Time spent on technical troubleshooting has also significantly dropped, with the ability to get suggested solutions to a lot of problems much faster. Coding has got a lot faster too. It’s also pretty good for checking work that’s been done by AI — but I guess that’s a double-edged sword!
Research tasks: in a lot of ways this is bad news for publishers, but it is so much easier to go and make a coffee while your favourite LLM goes off and does the equivalent of two hours trawling the web in the space of five minutes.
Enhancing existing products: All our media sites have had AI-enhanced search functionality for about a year now. While this isn’t heavily used as our standard search function wasn’t either, I think it is important for us to offer because we block the main LLMs from scraping and using our content, so we need to give our users a modern way to interrogate our content libraries.
People often don’t know what questions to ask, so we also provide suggested questions embedded within our content, and this significantly improves engagement with the AI interface.
We’re also working on providing individually personalised briefings for users, based on their activity and useful things that we know about them and considering offering this in an audio format as well as text.
Understanding your audience has always been one of the most important aspects of publishing and there are a few ways this has moved on. Our CDP now generates automatic audience segments based on a semantic understanding of the content people are reading. Understanding individual users at scale has always been tricky and rather broad brush. However, our sign-up process now asks people to describe their interests in their own words as well as using multiple choice questions. AI lets us use these verbatim statements in various ways, from tailoring our personalised briefings to surfacing real audience-interest trends to share with editorial teams.
New product development: This is where the fun really starts! We’re not in the business of pushing AI-generated editorial. Our human editors are incredibly valuable, and we don’t want to serve up poor imitations of what they can do. That said, we’ve just launched a huge product enhancement using AI-generated content. I know that sounds like a contradiction — I’ll explain:
Springwise.com has for a long time been a great editorial product that finds positive-impact innovations, writes about them and stores them in a searchable database. It’s a great product but there’s so much going on in that field that our team can only really scratch the surface. So, we’ve unleashed a team of AI agents to scour the web, find relevant new innovations, summarise and categories them and add them to the database. We’ve put a lot of human effort into training the algorithm, and still review, approve and, where necessary, improve the content, plus do an editorial write up of the most interesting ones. But the agents are now doing the heavy lifting, which means we can massively enlarge the scope of the database and free up editorial time to spend on higher value content, like exploring trends and insights from the data and interacting with subscribers.
Q: How do you expect this to change over the next 12 months?
A: Twelve months is a long time in AI, so, realistically, nobody knows. We’ll be doubling down on getting to know our audiences, engaging with them as much as possible and trying to give them value that they can’t get anywhere else.
Q: What are your three top tips?
1. Test, test again, then test some more!
2. Try to do something your users can’t already do for themselves.
3. What works for another site might not be right for you — so experiment, and don’t be disheartened if it’s not the first, second or third thing you do that’s actually any good.
Carl and the other contributors to our AI Special took part in an ‘AI Special – Q&A’ webinar on 18th November. You can watch a recording of the webinar by registering here
This article was included in the AI Special, published by InPublishing in October 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
