I do not know whether Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum and author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, knew back in 2017 that AI would so rapidly move society into the ‘Intelligent Age’. Nonetheless, the world has now irrevocably lurched into a new way of working. And this is only the beginning.
Considering how quickly the tools we use every day have evolved since the first LLMs appeared in 2022, anticipating where our business and industry is headed is a daunting task. AI may represent the most significant challenge to information businesses, but it is also the most likely source of counter measures and new opportunities.
Infopro Digital is a B2B information provider catering to financial risk management and risk transfer specialists at financial institutions. We have a mature subscriptions business and growing set of global conferences, festivals and professional networks. While some of the opportunities and challenges present differently in our B2B world, many publishers across the spectrum are at similar junctures.
Not least is the challenge of declining search traffic. Since Google introduced AI Overviews, and more recently AI Mode, the number of zero-click results has increased hugely and thus referrals to publisher sites have declined dramatically. As John Barnes, chief digital officer at William Reed, put it in a recent article for InPublishing: “How AI changes the way people search and engage with information is likely the most fundamental structural adjustment for media since the smartphone, and for some use-cases, it could be completely transformational.”
External threats of AI aside, we must embrace the opportunities. Colleagues need to be equipped and empowered to take advantage of what it brings. Product teams and the newsroom are often part of the more attention-grabbing outputs, but we have seen some great initiatives across sales, marketing and event production. Whilst it is right to back these initiatives, rapid industry changes could also potentially render our investments redundant. Services that took months to build with last year’s technology can now be done in an afternoon.
Further away from AI, pre-existing challenges still remain: tightening of data privacy rules, including the slow death of cookies; customer demands for greater reporting transparency and ROI; and increasing subscriber engagement remain constant areas of focus, core to how we operate our business.
While the challenges and opportunities are vast and varied, three strategic pillars must be advanced to prepare a B2B publishing business for the future:
1. Evolve your content strategy
As search traffic declines and publishers fight for attention next to improving machine-generated content, common threads of advice are emerging on how to build resilience into content, namely: specialisation, trust and exclusivity.
As more low-quality content is produced, a greater premium is placed on trust. Equally, content that is unique and specialist rather than generalist is far harder to replace. These concepts were discussed at length at the FT Strategies event, AI and the Future of Content Strategy.
At Infopro Digital, our brands have been built on the concept of producing in-depth, specialist information that cannot be found elsewhere. We will continue with this mantra, while broadening our content formats to keep up with changing demand and consumption patterns.
One example of this is our recently launched AI-generated article summaries. Our editorial teams pride themselves on the depth and quality of our journalism, but time-poor executives sometimes need other ways of understanding the latest stories without reading a 2,000-word article. Like many of our peers, we have introduced human-in-the-loop summaries at the top of articles.
The results so far are overwhelmingly positive subscriber feedback, and increased engagement time on articles. As we continue to develop for these consumption patterns, we will introduce standalone experiences made up of shorter-form stories.
An additional area utilising AI-enabled tools is translation into new languages. As with summaries, we retain a human-in-the-loop to ensure standards as we push the limitations of these models, but the quality of the translation tools have made this a commercial and operational success. We will continue to monitor and refine the translation workflows and roll out additional languages in due course.
2. Know your audience
Even with a resilient content strategy in place, attracting and engaging an audience while protecting content from unwanted AI-bots is a growing challenge.
Increasingly, media owners are putting up paywalls to protect their content and advance their first-party data strategy. Many publishers have had success with this strategy, and reader revenue is widely considered a realistic long-term alternative to decreasing advertising yields.
But paywalls alone are not enough to maximise the potential of member / subscriber data. They must be complemented by a comprehensive data management and data science platform.
Enrichment and verification
In B2B, up to 20% of contacts are lost each year as professionals change jobs or stop engaging with services. Locating these users in their new role increases lifetime value, and is more effective than engaging new users.
As well as verifying contact accuracy, we diligently enrich our demographic and firmographic fields, using a combination of human input, third-party services and AI-enabled approaches. This blend continues to evolve quickly.
Maintaining a well-managed and up-to-date contact database is essential for safeguarding email marketing as a key engagement channel. While the death of email has been predicted for over a decade, it has experienced a rebirth, particularly around reader engagement. Delivering messages to the inboxes of major banks can be challenging, so we focus on message relevance targeting active users, as well as technical measures such as enforcing strict DMARC policies, monitoring IP reputation, and exploring protocols like BIMI.
Behavioural data
Adding behavioural activity from across user touchpoints is crucial, especially for marketing automation and personalisation strategies.
As demand increases for specialist journalism and closer engagement with subscribers, behavioural data will be key to success. One growing strand is the introduction of dynamic paywalls to cater for varying cohorts of audience. According to INMA, nearly 40% of publishers are experimenting with or intend to experiment with dynamic paywalls, with some strong results being cited from early adopters.
Many paywall providers and other tools are now AI-enabled and require rich, accurate and timely datasets. So whether your focus is third-party solutions, CRMs, CDPs, or comprehensive data platforms to consolidate contact data, you must manage data effectively and make it accessible across the organisation.
We use CRMs in a sophisticated way alongside a data lakehouse architecture. This data platform has changed how many teams utilise data: marketing can access complete customer profiles for automated processes, the editorial team can analyse subscriber reading patterns and content performance in more detail, and the customer success team can recognise and act on at-risk subscriptions rapidly.
3. Develop your adjacent products
There appears to be no single bet publishers can place for diversifying beyond traditional journalism with any certainty. In B2B at least, the trends appear to centre around proprietary data services and / or in-person events and professional networks.
Community spirit
Demand and supply of in-person conferences is experiencing a post-Covid resurgence. As online information grows and trust declines, human connection has become more valuable. This is good news for publishers who can produce event-led products that don’t depend on fickle web traffic. The FT reports several strong results and forecasts among event organisers and acquisition activity in the space.
Infopro Digital is focused on growing editorially led conferences, married to its online brands. Flagship festivals attract senior risk leaders, then the newsroom turns those sessions into reporting and analysis that keeps the conversation going online — a virtuous circle that increases authority and makes the content live beyond the physical events.
Monetising data
Publishers are increasingly turning to proprietary data services such as indexes, trackers, directories, dashboards and APIs that plug directly into professional workflows. The Lawyer, Health Service Journal, The Banker, The Grocer, RELX, Fastmarkets, Axco and Retail Week are just some of the players in the data services space, with new players entering regularly.
Generally, these services fall into one of two groups: products that complement editorial coverage, deepening the amount of specialist information provided; and analytical tools that help clients increase or demonstrate ROI from demand generation.
The first group typically involves collecting and maintaining proprietary datasets that are presented interactively to the user. Different flavours of AI such as OCR and even ‘legacy’ machine learning models can play specific and significant roles in collecting and transforming raw data. As these improve, so can the breadth and depth of data that can be mined. Alongside the data services, the chance to provide original commentary and analysis is often more valuable and monetisable than the data itself.
As for analytical tools, these can be a by-product of strong first-party data management described earlier. A data platform’s core functions are typically business intelligence, marketing automation and personalised experiences, but it doesn’t have to stop there. Accommodating demand generation data within your scope can enhance the value of a campaign and more clearly demonstrate ROI.
The pace of change shows no sign of slowing. Our industry must simultaneously defend existing models and embrace new ones. We must deepen the trust and specialisation at the heart of our brands while adapting quickly and experimenting heavily.
As Schwab said in an interview with TIME: “If we do not want to be dominated by technology, we have to become a more human society.” This is a vital sentiment for the decisions we make for our businesses, and how we learn to thrive in the Intelligent Age.
Further reading
- InPublishing: Is the website dying? by John Barnes (2025)
- FT Strategies: AI and the Future of Content Strategy - video of event (2025)
- INMA: Next-gen paywalls balance privacy, engagement, revenue growth (2025)
- TIME: 7 Questions With Klaus Schwab (2016)
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
