What Impact is AI Having on Publishing Careers?

On 4 December 2025, the PTC ran a webinar with speakers from academia, a publisher and recruitment, about the impact AI is having on the industry. Below are key points from the event transcript.

What brought you to AI?

Angus Phillips (AP): I've been interested in it for a few years. The students are really interested in the topic now, and many are doing research projects around the use of AI.

Suzy Astbury (SA): As a recruiter, we are talking to businesses about their talent needs, and the skills that they need for their business. How do we embrace AI into our jobs, so that our candidates remain relevant?

Sara Lloyd (SL): In my role as Global AI Lead, I'm looking after four main areas in AI: our strategy; governance and ethics; facilitating innovation and change; and stakeholder engagement.

What impact is AI having on publishing jobs at the moment?

SA: Not every role being recruited is demanding AI skills, but the larger organisations are testing at interview for some skills. We call them “power skills” – they are also known as “soft skills”, like curiosity, adaptability and resilience. Also, the appetite for change, because the landscape is one of change. If we're hiring anybody, we want to make sure that they're going to be part of that, and not the other way.

In terms of departments, it's everywhere. A lot of people know about generative AI, the large-language models (LLMs), ChatGPT, Copilot. In Marketing, we have new skills like GEO [Generative Engine Optimisation], which is like SEO [Search Engine Optimisation], but its focus is on coming up in searches on LLMs.

SL: It has the potential to touch every role, and should be touching every role. Anyone in any role should be engaging with this topic, if they're going to future-proof themselves as a talent that people may want to buy, whether freelance or in-house. The current impact of AI is automation, optimisation, personalisation and making the publishing process faster, more efficient and more data-driven. Becoming more data-orientated is something I would recommend people do.

AI will enable us to be marketing books all the time, including 7,000 books on the backlist. On the production and operations side, it's streamlining. It can improve outcomes, reduce costs, being more efficient and sustainable in how much we print, how much we warehouse, or using automation for boring manual labour, like asset tagging, or generating alt text, or formatting EPUBs.

Audience poll: How often are you using AI?

How can people work with AI and use it to help themselves and the organisation?

SL: Everyone's looking for flexible, adaptable people who are open to change, who are comfortable with uncertainty, and are ready to lead the charge. It's thinking about the way that you can best use your expertise, your experience to apply to outcomes from the tools that you'll be able to use. So you need to understand what are the tools good at, but also where are they not delivering? Where do you need your human skills to kind of counterpoint what the tool can produce? What could you do if you now had an army of your own assistants, what other capabilities could you add that supplement your own, or what more could you do? What more creative things could you do?

What do you advise people who are trying to get into publishing, or want to up their AI profile?

SA: Once this moment has passed, AI will become invisible. It'll be part of the infrastructure; you won't even know that you're using it. So this is the perfect moment to stand out and elevate your career. And then to break it down into things that AI is going to change, like all those assistants, they're task-based parts of our role. Which will make our roles so much more exciting to enable us to be much more human, much more creative.

In terms of how do I get into publishing? It's still incredibly hard, but, understanding where the industry's heading, and being able to speak about that, is a good start. It's leaning in, it's coming up with ideas.

AP: You've got to think of it as a possible competitive advantage, this is an opportunity, and you need to get ahead of other people: having a think about it, sign up to the newsletters, find out what's going on, not just the newsletters in publishing, but also from outside too. Don't get overwhelmed by what's going on in AI, but get an understanding of how it's affecting media industries, what the impacts are. Talking to publishers, project management skills are really important. If you can boost your project management skills, they're really going to apply to AI.

Audience poll: Which AI tools are you using at the moment?

What new jobs and opportunities is AI going to create in publishing?

AP: There will be jobs for content managers, project managers, people thinking up new ways of using this technology. And you think about how AI can look at 8 documents and summarise them. What does that mean for learning? How is it going to help an individual student? It is a question of having that mindset to think laterally and be willing to see the possibilities around AI.

SA: There will be a greater need for really brilliant line managers. Because if AI is going to be very task-led, we're going to need better line managers to manage the humans as well. How do we stand out as a candidate with AI? Make sure you are discoverable. There are new job titles and skills on LinkedIn that you can tag on your profile and include on your CV.

SL: Let's get creative. What could be the things what entrepreneurial things could we do now? What new products and services could we create? The role I think that's nearest to what Angus was talking about, I call “Synthetic Media Producer”. What I mean is overseeing the creation of AI-generated content, or pulling together things across bundles of products, or ways that people can interact with content in different ways, particularly in the learning environment, and perhaps the business environment, too.

AI is extremely good at working with and crunching big data, but there will be new data roles as well, or newly evolved data roles. They'll be working out the insights, what are the what-ifs?

We're going to need many more people who understand ethics, bias, the law around AI, and how to manage all of that. Reviewing AI systems and content outputs to ensure fairness, understand cultural sensitivities, prevent bias in recommendations or screening. And training roles. We're going to need more and more digital transformation trainers sitting alongside businesses, working for businesses, working within businesses.

Audience poll: How do you feel about AI with regard to your career?

How do you feel about AI?

SL: It's fine to feel worried, to feel conflicted. It's important to acknowledge that. I worry about the downsides of AI in its broadest sense. The way I try to handle that is to acknowledge the feelings, and to recognise that feeling those feelings is okay, and then to move beyond that, and to come to grips with it's here to stay, and I'd rather be the person who is grappling with it and trying to work out what might some solutions be. Because the conflicting bit is often to do with the fact that AI is not bad on its own, it's that some bad people might use it in bad ways. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with AI. So it's trying to take a little bit of agency and ownership, and think, well, I'm going to make my decisions about where I want to use it, and how I want to use it.