InPublishing: Looking back, facing the future

In 2024, many in the publishing and information industry have found themselves at a crossroads. This year has forced us to reckon with global challenges that impact core aspects of our business — inflation has pushed operational costs up, and political and geopolitical shifts have disrupted pricing, consumer confidence and demand patterns. For publishers and information providers, these factors have added another layer of complexity to the already rapid pace of change.

Artificial intelligence, specifically GenAI, has become central to discussions on how we navigate this landscape. Once a source of both excitement and apprehension, GenAI now sits at the heart of strategic discussions in publishing. Encouragingly, the initial hype has subsided to be replaced with a more measured, pragmatic approach. Forward-thinking publishers and information providers are asking pointed questions: What tangible benefits can AI offer? How does it improve our business processes and enhance customer value? And, perhaps most importantly, do the returns from GenAI justify the investment?

As the hype settles, AI’s role in publishing becomes clearer. It’s not about implementing AI for the sake of it. Instead, it’s about understanding where AI genuinely adds value and fits within our goals of providing accurate, timely information to consumers. For many, this means using AI tools to improve content discovery, support data-driven decision-making, and bring efficiency to complex workflows.

The shift towards a pragmatic perspective is promising. It suggests that AI, when applied thoughtfully, can be a tool that aligns with the industry’s unique needs, strengthening our resilience amidst global uncertainties and opening up new pathways for growth and customer engagement.

What unites the leading publishers in this space?

Regardless of whether they serve B2C, B2B, or niche sectors, successful publishers in 2024 share common traits that set them apart, focusing their efforts on adaptability, integration, and an unwavering commitment to delivering value to their users.

The leaders of the pack have embraced a multi-faceted strategy, diversifying their revenue streams beyond traditional static content sales. By offering data-driven tools, services and integrated workflow solutions, they’re expanding to fit seamlessly into their audiences’ personal or professional lives, making their offering essential to daily tasks and decisions. Central to their approach is a heightened focus on personalisation — using data to craft tailored user journeys that deepen engagement and enhance usability, ensuring that each user feels individually catered to and valued.

Artificial intelligence plays a key role in this shift, offering productivity gains and early product innovations. Many publishers have found success in deploying AI to power advanced search capabilities, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and natural language search, which allow users to quickly and intuitively access relevant content. AI-driven content repurposing, such as transforming articles into podcasts, explainers or study guides, has also added value for users at relatively low cost.

The final component of success is a holistic integration of content and data that breaks down traditional silos. Successful publishers are leveraging AI to derive insights from diverse and disparate sources and content types — text, data, video, audio, images, events etc. For example, one of our clients has launched a new product that summarises complex numerical data and contextualises it alongside journalistic narrative analysis; another is repurposing content from their events within their subscription product, driving revenue and utility long after the conferences close. By innovating in these ways, they’re setting new standards for what it means to be an indispensable resource in today’s information economy.

What should publishers be prioritising for 2025?

As publishers look to 2025, prioritising growth through strategic innovation, refining AI applications, and revenue diversification will be essential to staying competitive. We believe the following themes are where publishers should be pouring their energy into in the next twelve months to reduce their risk and maximise available opportunities.

1. Invest in delivering prescriptive intelligence.

Moving beyond basic descriptive analytics, publishers should prioritise prescriptive intelligence — data that doesn’t just describe trends but recommends specific actions. We’ve described this in previous columns, but, in essence, prescriptive intelligence delivers actionable insights, enabling customers to make well-informed decisions. In our experience, this is the clearest path to becoming an indispensable resource for your users.

2. Expand AI beyond search to solve real problems.

The low-hanging fruit of AI-driven search improvements has been a popular choice for publishers looking to utilise AI in their workflows. The next step is to apply AI more broadly, enhancing productivity and addressing specific customer needs. This could include AI-powered content repurposing, such as generating plain language summaries, creating podcasts from existing content, or offering data visualisations. Publishers should take stock of current AI initiatives, identify the most promising opportunities, and allocate resources to bring these innovations to market effectively.

3. Focus on Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) models.

As data grows in value, providing DaaS offerings has the potential to be a significant revenue stream. By delivering packaged data insights directly to customers within their existing tools and workflows, publishers can leverage their unique data assets, providing clients with powerful, context-rich information that’s otherwise difficult to source. Investing in DaaS infrastructure and defining value propositions around these data products should be a top priority.

4. Identify and remove barriers to innovation.

Many promising initiatives get held back by resource limitations, cultural inertia, or skill gaps. Publishers should re-evaluate their people, processes and technology, and be willing to bring in experienced professionals who can mentor teams, identify roadblocks, and help steer new ideas to market. Consider dedicating time and budget to ensuring your teams are ready to work with AI, data science, and product development, fostering an agile, innovative mindset across the organisation.

5. Consider strategic M&A.

With borrowing costs easing, M&A activity is again a viable growth avenue. Pursuing acquisitions in complementary tech or data domains can bolster publishers’ capabilities and expand their offerings. Look for ways in which to add more or better context to your own data and content, or ready-made niche communities that align with your own and would find your products valuable within their own workflows. For those looking to prepare their businesses for being acquired, the increased appetite in this space, especially from private equity, means ensuring you are demonstrating the maximum value from your products will be paramount.

6. Licensing content for AI.

A number of high-profile licensing deals have already happened this year, including partnerships announced with some of the biggest names in media like Bloomberg and the FT. For many, the question still remains as to whether they should look to ink similar deals now, potentially grabbing a bigger pot of money in the immediate term, or hold fast to see which of the models becomes the dominant force — or indeed whether they can create a big enough moat around their content and communities that they don’t need to partner at all. For every company, the calculations will be different, and it may be useful to bring in some outside expertise to help navigate this new landscape. For those choosing to licence, I’d recommend using the revenue influx as an ‘innovation grant’ to transform your business for the new world. Remember, making money from AI-related content licensing doesn’t have to mean cutting deals with OpenAI. It comes back to getting your content to where your users want to use it, and if that means licensing data direct to customers to index and use in their own proprietary tools, that can be a positive way forward that doesn’t require the capex and risk of building your own product if you are not in a position to do so.

Our advice for getting this right

So, which is the right path forward for your company? And how do you get moving successfully?

The first thing you’ll need is clarity. Foremost here is clarity over where your value lies. You need to understand what unique value your product, data or content provides to your audience — what insights and competitive advantages they gain from you that they can’t get elsewhere. Secondly, clarity over your internal goals. What are you trying to achieve — diversifying revenue streams, entering new markets, reducing operational costs...? Knowing this will give you the focus to make strategic choices and measure success accurately. You should consistently revisit these goals to ensure alignment across your teams and keep projects focused on delivering value where it matters. Don’t forget, strategic choices are often as much about what you say ‘no’ to, as what you decide to actively pursue. Finally, get clarity over what you already have. We recommend auditing people, processes, data and technology so that you know exactly what your starting point is.

Once you have your clarity, you’ll need to address your internal mindset. For a long time, publishers have seen data as a static entity, and long form content as merely words in a PDF or on a website. The opportunity ahead is to become something much more multifaceted and prescriptive, working in partnership with your customers within their workflows to power their decision-making and ultimately making your product unmissable. That shift can be difficult, so don’t shy away from bringing in experts who can take a neutral stance within your company to shine a light on where you can improve in order to meet this goal.

In order to deliver on the promise of all this opportunity, you’ll need the right approach. Paramount to this is the people — your teams need to become comfortable with change and understand that product development, technology and innovation are required to meet the needs of tomorrow’s content consumers and fuel the growth of your company. For many, this will also mean the right partners. Whoever you decide to partner with, make sure they truly understand your business and the sector it is operating within. Applying a one-size fits all approach here will not provide the level of transformation required to meet the challenges, and opportunities, ahead.