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Platform Strategies 2025: Welcome Keynote
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Platform Strategies 2025: Welcome Keynote
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Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE HANSEN: So we'll go ahead and kick off. All right. Well, welcome, everyone, to Platform Strategies 2025. My name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen I'm the VP of marketing at Silverchair. You've received a lot of emails from me. And I'm just going to cover some quick logistics before I hand it over to Will Schweitzer to kick us off. So first, we're very excited to have you with us today, returning to the Eden.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: I see a lot of familiar faces. So hopefully you know your way around, but I'll just cover a few of these things just to get us started. You can find a map of the venue. You can find the full agenda. You can ask questions, all the stuff, in the event app. So that's going to be key to navigating the day. We have some polls and things like that.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: You can also ask questions throughout the day. We'll have mic runners. And we definitely enjoy a lot of engagement at this event, so we encourage you to take advantage of that. If you need another reason to download the app, there is an Easter egg, so please find me if you find it. Today's sessions are being recorded and will be made publicly available after the event. Returning attendees know that we always like to offer something kind of fun.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: We had a little bit creepy AI photo booth last year. We had a live sketch artist one year. So this year, what we have is we're trying to capture the odd moment we find ourselves in by creating a time capsule. So there are buttons you can fill in. There's a little instax photos and predictions. So feel free to do those during the breaks or lunch, and we will revisit them next year and see what came true.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: And then finally, I just want to thank our sponsors for the event. Digital Science, our charging station sponsor, if you need your phone charged throughout the day. OpenAthens, our morning break sponsor. Access Innovations, our afternoon break sponsor. DCL, who sponsored the lovely breakfast that you just had, and Hum, our lunch sponsor. So thank you all for supporting this meeting.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: And with that, I'm going to kick it over to Will Schweitzer, Silverchair CEO. [APPLAUSE]
WILL SCHWEITZER: Good morning. If it's strategies in D.C., it is raining. Sorry we can't control the weather. I hope nobody gets drenched. So we haven't met. I'm Will Schweitzer. I'm Silverchair's CEO. I've been with the company now for six years. And thank you for joining us. We really appreciate everyone coming.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And in the next 15 minutes, I'm going to try to set the stage for today's program. Maybe stir the pot. You could think of it as an amuse-bouche. Just want to try to expand our thinking a bit. And I'd like to start with our collective state of mind. I don't always agree with Janan Ganesh, who's a columnist for The Financial Times, but he makes me think. And three weeks ago, he wrote that, "at some point, being smart and worried became conterminous.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Pessimism is now a shortcut to intellectual respectability, much like using orchestra in a pop song or filming in black and white." Now, his job is to get clicks, and empathy really doesn't do that. But the whole point of this, his whole point, kind of stayed with me. And it leads me to this invocation for the day, which is have the audacity not to mope, which was the title of this piece, but to leave the office and your worries behind today, to think expansively about the future.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We know one thing with all the challenges that we're facing, which is our mission and our content matters more now than ever. And that is an incredible promise and obligation many of us have. We'll talk a lot about AI today and how AI stands to transform almost every part of what we do. It's anybody's bet how fast that is going to happen, but I'm betting our dollars, it's going to happen faster than open access has transformed this industry.
WILL SCHWEITZER: For our life scientists and biology publishers or researchers in the room, I think we're at a cladogenetic moment, where we'll end up with two different types of publishers-- the AI-adapted and the aggregated imprint. And I know what side of the divide I'd rather be on. The one thing we'd like to encourage today and that we try to do what Silverchair generally is to support pragmatic and ethical and responsible experimentation and adaptation.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I think that's something all of us in the room need to be doing. And if this wasn't cheerleader enough, which I was accused of being last year for scholarly publishing, we can turn to our rapid laureate for some inspiration. And with that, let me start previewing the program. Natalie Jacobs, Emerald's Chief Product Officer, is giving our opening keynote this morning. I'm really excited to hear her talk about publisher and technology readiness.
WILL SCHWEITZER: When we were preparing, kind of getting ready and sharing some ideas, Natalie was previewing her talk, I was reminded of Prahalad and Hamel's Core Competency Theory. And when we consider that AI can transform so many aspects of our workflow, how we relate to our end users and our stakeholders, I think it leads me to this core competency question, which is when we can transform so much of what we do, what is the highest and best use of our capability?
WILL SCHWEITZER: How should we be redeploying our talent and our intellectual property to sustain our missions? I hope Natalie has a few answers for us later this morning. Following Natalie, we'll hear from Mia Ritchie at AGU, Jay Brodsky at AAAS, and Casper Grathwohl from OUP on why our missions remain important and how we can continue fulfilling them. Given the shifts that we're seeing in the market, Theodore Levitt's timeless words seem worth revisiting.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I'll promise I will stop referencing the Harvard Business Review right here. But if you haven't read Marketing Myopia, it is worth 15 minutes of your time, particularly as we're grappling with all of this change and strategic questions. I was slowly warming you all up to very, very dense data slides. And please don't worry, I'm not going to talk through all of them.
WILL SCHWEITZER: But following that panel-- and this is a bit of programming genius from my colleague Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen-- we'll hear from two researchers. We'll hear from Dr. Irene Newton, who's a professor of biology at Indiana, a AAAS fellow, an Editor in Chief of an ASM journal, and we'll hear from Donnie Prasad, who's a doctoral candidate at Cornell. We've asked them for their candid thoughts about publishers, our platforms, and their workflow.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And what this data on the screen from OUP and Wiley suggests, and our own internal data from the Silverchair platform, is that AI is being readily adopted, and it is changing how scholarly content is created, reviewed, discovered, and consumed. I've come to view kind of LLM agents as a complementary for now distribution channel. And as you head into the sessions today, my one perspective is this-- your audience is moving, your stakeholders are adapting, and you should consider meeting them.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I know that's fraught. Following that, we'll hear from my far more colorful, entertaining and brilliant colleague Stuart Leach, Silverchair's CTO. Stuart's talk this afternoon is a continuation of his 2023 keynote, and he'll share his thoughts on how AI is transforming platform strategies and our work within Silverchair. We're going to pull the curtain back a bit to talk about how we approach software development and how you can approach your job, even if you're a business user, not a technologist or a product manager.
WILL SCHWEITZER: There's two bits of perspective I'd like to offer as a preview to Stu's talk. One is, regardless of whether you think AI is hype or we are in a bubble, and there's good data to suggest we're facing really precarious market conditions, the sheer amount of capital being deployed in the economy writ large. And then even within our market, when you look at the dollars here that Wiley or Elsevier or others are spending in research and development means that there will be lasting seen behavioral and infrastructure and product advances in our market.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're at a point where you can no longer afford to ignore this. And if you haven't started experimenting, you should. The second bit of perspective is this-- our workforce, much like researchers, are ready, if not eager, to embrace AI tooling. On the left is data from a McKenzie workforce survey from earlier this year that was really helpful to me in running our now 260-person company. The data suggests that our employees expect us to provide AI tooling to help them do their jobs, that they are ready for professional learning and development.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And on the right-hand side is our internal data. Silverchair has now rolled out Claude Code or Claude Desktop to every Silverchairian in the company, and we are rolling out kind of organizational wide learning and development, socialization, and reinforcement activities. Our early results are promising, but it speaks to our intention and our investment that we believe this technology is here to stay, and it can make us more valuable partners and more effective at our jobs.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm very excited for our closing keynote from Andrew Bradford, who's a professor at Columbia University. She's an expert in digital regulation and the global economy, and particularly the EU's regulatory power. And if you've read anything about the Eu's approach to AI or technology, you now know that it stands in stark contrast to that here in the United States.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So it should be a really interesting talk. I'll end here the preview with some data from Christos Petrou that was in the Scholarly Kitchen, and then our internal white paper from ScholarOne on peer review that underscore long-standing shifts in authoring and reviewing and in researcher behavior are only likely to accelerate given all of the exogenous changes in our market.
WILL SCHWEITZER: When we think about funding shifts, prioritization changes, massive investments that are being made in R&D or in academia, the trends here on this slide are only likely to accelerate. We are likely to see far more AIPAC journals, more papers, and a change in the mix of reviewers and authors across any form of science and scholarship. And I think all of our businesses are going to look very different in five years.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So I hope everyone has had their coffee. It's hopefully going to be a very good and productive day. And again, my colleagues and I are very thankful that you've joined us. You're in our home for the day, or you've been in our home for two days now and maybe for a third. So if there is anything that you need, please ask any Silverchairian. We are here for you.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And as with last year, I'm going to end with asks for everybody here in this room. So given we are all here to share and learn and make connections, my three asks are aligned with Silverchair's values and they are-- assumed positive intent throughout the day. When I read some industry blogs, or I look at posts in Scholarly Kitchen, or I look at exchanges in LinkedIn, there's a lot of armchair quarterbacking.
WILL SCHWEITZER: There's a lot of folks that are complaining that a survey wasn't perfect, or we shouldn't be trying a slight tweak, say, on an open access business model. That isn't helpful to anyone. And if we assume that folks are trying to fulfill their mission, that they're making an earnest effort to adapt and figure out what works for their business, it should be applauded. And the same applies for everyone contributing today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Which takes me to my second ask of you all-- contribute generously. Everyone in this room has a unique perspective on the challenges we're seeing in the industry. You have data from your programs. You have experience working with your stakeholders. In times like this, we need to help each other out. So if you have a thought, if you have feedback, if you have a question, please don't hesitate to grab the microphone, or use the app, or talk to a member of the team today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And my last ask is meet somebody new. A compliment can go a really long way. There are a lot of new faces in the room today, kind of reflecting our growing community, which is really exciting. So we don't want anybody to leave a stranger. You never know where a relationship in this industry can take you. And then speaking of compliments, I'm going to hand it over to the best mustache in scholarly publishing and my good friend Dustin Smith to introduce our keynote speaker.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you, Dustin. [APPLAUSE]
DUSTIN SMITH: Good morning. That's very generous. I mean, Teo's over there, OK? So I'm Dustin Smith. I'm co-founder, CEO, and informally Chief of Stash at Hum. We're building the intelligence layer for publishers, which is an ambitious thing to say right in front of Will Schweitzer, through the alchemist suite of products.
DUSTIN SMITH: And we're deep in AI and we have been for years now. The modern wave of AI is now truly cresting. And if we think back seven years ago, six years ago to platform strategies, it felt like people were playing a somewhat fixed game. You were playing it with more fewer resources, but ultimately, the game board was kind of fixed and you were tweaking around the edges. And that was really the later stages of digital transformation.
DUSTIN SMITH: We're now in the early stages of AI transformation. Obviously, we'll say AI so many times up here today. But it's really exciting. Fundamentally, the game board is changing. It's evolving. And people, I think, will grant, even if you're more conservative, that AI transformation is going to be at least as big as digital transformation. But it's quite possible it will be as big as electricity.
DUSTIN SMITH: And so mental work will go the way that some of the physical work had gone in the incident of electricity. And maybe it'll be as big as agriculture. So ultimately, civilization-level change. On any of those horizons, there's quite a bit of change coming, and anybody who's working at the coalface feels model drops, the evolution in architecture, the rapid pace of change such that you just have to hold on.
DUSTIN SMITH: And so it's my pleasure to introduce Natalie Jacobs from Emerald, who's going to talk about how you're adaptive and how you can hold on for the ride. So thanks so much. [APPLAUSE]
NATALIE JACOBS: Hi, everybody. I feel like I don't need to introduce myself now because two people have introduced me and it feels really weird to tell you my name again. But in prepping for this, I realized that I don't think I've done a face-to-face for more than about five minutes since pre-pandemic. So I don't have my screens for security. I do not have a cat running behind me to distract you, and I need a minute to take time, so hopefully you'll be kind to me and bear with me as I embrace the fact that I can see the whites of your eyes and that's a little bit disconcerting.
NATALIE JACOBS: But anyway, we're here today to talk about readiness for the future of publishing. So the phrase "change is the only constant," whether it's attributed to Franklin or someone else, because the internet was not clear on this, by the way, I think has been a really red thread through my career, from back when I started as an educational publisher over many, many years ago now. And it's got to the point where it feels like a bit of a cliché.
NATALIE JACOBS: I feel like I say it all the time, but unfortunately, the pace of change seems to be drastically accelerating. The last few years, I think we haven't really stopped. It's been something coming at us from every direction, every day, every week, it seems. And while some things have not changed, the fact that the PDF still seems to be king is slightly traumatizing for me at least, particularly given the lack of optimization of accessibility and discoverability and everything else that we know is good and valuable.
NATALIE JACOBS: It still feels like we're getting pummeled from all sides. And that seems to be true for everybody. It doesn't matter if we're small or large, if we're not for profit, if we're commercial. I think some days it feels a little bit like there's no escape. So I'm just going to spend today talking a little bit about some thoughts on this and how we at Emerald have been trying to prepare ourselves and put ourselves in a place where we can cope with the change waves that keep hitting because I think if we reflect on where we've got to, I don't think, even a few years ago, we could have been prepared for just the kind of magnitude of the integrity crisis that we're facing.
NATALIE JACOBS: I don't think we could have anticipated the situation that we've got here in the US, with the threats to international collaboration, to certain areas of research, really just being in dire straits, to be honest. And that is causing a ripple effect across every market, not just here, in terms of the impact. All that, whether you want it to or not, AI is transforming everything we do. I don't think we can have a conversation without having AI in there at this point.
NATALIE JACOBS: So you might be hoping that I'm going to stand here and I'm going to share my views on exactly where the future of publishing is going. Sure, we've all got our own ideas-- that silver bullet that's going to drive success us or the unicorn that's going to solve every single one of our problems. And that would be really lovely. I'd really love to do that for you.
NATALIE JACOBS: It's probably not that easy, though, at this point. And I think the only honest answer that we've got-- oh, it's sliding ahead. Sorry. The only honest answer that we've got is that the future is too uncertain at the moment. We can't really anticipate what's going to happen. There's so much change. The pace is ever increasing.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I don't even think we've got to feel that there's stabilization on the horizon. We can't look ahead and see that there's clear skies or a light at the end of the tunnel. And the future itself, I think, is going to be different for each one of us. And I think that that's true for us as an industry, but the thing that makes it particularly hard for us is that it's also true and potentially worse for every single one of our customers, whether they're people buying content to consume, whether they are the ones trying to produce it.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that critically, it's going to be really hard for us to be in a position to anticipate and deliver on solutions for the future for them because we don't really know what they want and they don't know what they need yet. They can't really also anticipate what's coming for the next few years. And I think they are also trying to keep up with this constant evolution, not really sure where to turn or what's going to happen next.
NATALIE JACOBS: And they've obviously got a slightly different lens on it, whether it's budgets, whether it's funding, changing economics, political instability, but all that impact is going to change their needs and their decisions. And inevitably, I think that we're going to have to prepare for a future that we're not really sure about, and we don't know what that is going to look like.
NATALIE JACOBS: I think the one thing that stands out, though, and I think that we should feel lucky about, is that it has at least remained constant for us that our industry, education and research does largely, maybe not from everybody, remain valued. I don't think we feel like HE or research as a whole is going to disappear. But we do take our lead from our customers and they're slow to change, they're slow to innovate, and that means that we are also slow to innovate because we don't want to bite the hand that feeds us, and we want to keep pace with them.
NATALIE JACOBS: But we probably could be doing more to guide them and to lead them in this if we can create the space to do that and give ourselves some time. So with the best will in the world, even if we think we know what we need to do and are planning for the future, the future often has other ideas. Does anybody know where this is?
NATALIE JACOBS: I'm sorry if you've seen this example before. No? Excuse my pronunciation because I might get this wrong. I think this is called Choluteca bridge. It's in Honduras. I've probably butchered how to pronounce it. But it was, at one point, considered one of the great architectural works in Honduras. And it was built to replicate the Golden Gate Bridge and to control the flow of traffic from Guatemala to Panama.
NATALIE JACOBS: And back in the 1990s, a second bridge was built because this one was getting pummeled. There's lots of weather conditions, there's challenges, and it was suffering. So a new bridge that was designed to be completely indestructible was built. And in the same year that it was commissioned, Honduras got hit by a massive hurricane. And true to form, this bridge was really badly damaged.
NATALIE JACOBS: It was almost destroyed. There was loads of impact on infrastructure, but the new bridge survived. It was indestructible. It had come through the storm. It had all been a success, the planning had paid off and the future proofing has worked. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Well, not in practice because this is that bridge today.
NATALIE JACOBS: This bridge has absolutely no roads whatsoever because as a result of the hurricane and the massive flooding that came with it, the river carved itself a completely new channel. It washed out all of the roads and everything. So it's now just a bridge to nowhere that probably cost a lot of money. And I think for me, this really represents the risk that we are facing right now with the changes and shifts that we are seeing at every turn.
NATALIE JACOBS: Something like paper mills where we respond, they respond. Like, every time we do something, they seem to get ahead of us again. We've got to be realistic that we can't foresee everything and we have to be ready. But I think the last thing that we really want to do is to be this bridge and to be left in the middle of nowhere. So we're going to have to foster some agility, some adaptability and probably most importantly, some resilience so that we're in a position to respond to changes as they come and be in a position to embrace the transformative opportunities that I think can come with change.
NATALIE JACOBS: Any of you who know Louise Russell? I stole this from my colleague, but I think she stole it from Louise. So if you've seen it before, thanks to Louise. So that does all sound a bit depressing. I don't think we want to build a bridge that goes to nowhere. And even if we plan and we do things right, I think we have to be honest that we could end up in a dead end.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that we need to be comfortable that that's OK, but we need to do something about it. So where we've landed at Emerald is that we are trying to focus on ways to prepare for the unknown unknowns, the things that we can't really get ahead of, we can't be sure what's coming, and to think about the impact that they could have and to put ourselves in a position to respond as quickly and effectively as we can.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I'll just pause for a minute. I'll do a very quick elevator pitch. Sorry. Obviously representing Emerald, have to do this. So for those of you that don't know us, we are a mission-led social sciences publisher. We have journals, we have books and cases, and we focus on research specifically that tackles societal challenges.
NATALIE JACOBS: So we're here to really drive change. Change to lives, change the world, and make a very positive difference with the impact of the research that we publish. We've got a very strong customer footprint across Asia and also EMEA, and a growing position in the Americas, although current challenges notwithstanding, maybe. But I think most importantly, for the purposes of what we're talking about today, is that I think we're realistically, at best, a medium-sized publisher.
NATALIE JACOBS: We need to be comfortable with that. That's not to say that we don't have big ambitions, not to say that we don't want to be doing more, and that we're trying to be more than we are and drive more than our size. But I think over the last couple of years, it's been really clear that our sheer capacity to deliver on the business initiatives that we want or respond to our customers, our industry has kind of been stalling a little bit, and that's something that we needed to do something about.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I'm going to take you back, pre-pandemic, back when I first joined emerald. I was very shiny and new and fresh faced, obviously, coming into the organization. I felt like everything was in a really good place. We'd got everything in hand. The week I joined, we launched our own proprietary platform. Not the best week to start in a new job, by the way, when everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
NATALIE JACOBS: But we were talking about some of the big ticket items that we needed to face into as a business. We were thinking about being future ready. We'd just done this massive platform launch. We were in the right place. We were in control of our own destiny. Everything was brilliant. And then obviously, the pandemic hit, and it reminded us that the world often has other plans when you think you're prepared.
NATALIE JACOBS: So immobilizing our teams for disruption and for the change of the pandemic and what followed, we became really acutely aware of one thing-- our beautiful, well-oiled internal machine turned out to be a tanker and not a speedboat. We were only small. We kind of always felt that our size would be our superpower. We're not too big. We don't have loads of red tape and bureaucracy.
NATALIE JACOBS: We've got people. We're in control of everything. We can just deploy. We should be able to pause, reflect, respond and adjust and be on top of the situation. But none of that was actually really very true in practice, unfortunately. And I think the biggest challenge for us at the time was the balance of keeping the lights on, doing all the core stuff, everything that you can't get away from but nobody really wants to talk about, and actually doing the shiny, the new, the exciting, the preparation for something to come.
NATALIE JACOBS: So we had all this time and resource and effort going on behind the scenes. The boring stuff, I suppose you would say, that if we think about our customer facing platform, it would be the security, the stability, the uptime, accessibility, everything that our customers don't really care to talk about unless it's fallen off a cliff. If something's wrong, they're going to be massively vocal about it.
NATALIE JACOBS: But if you're doing it right, nobody ever really talks about it. And as we tried to respond to these changes, we were having to make decisions on the need that we just had to deliver things. We just had to get stuff out the door. So we were doing things increasingly manually. And it turns out that holding stuff together with sticky tape and glue is not particularly scalable or sustainable.
NATALIE JACOBS: Running things off a spreadsheet is going to catch up and bite you at later date. And we were just spending so much time on holding everything together. And I think more importantly, we were not doing our job to support our customers. We were not getting to the things that they were asking for, that they were demanding. Some of them just even hygiene factors, I'm sure we would say.
NATALIE JACOBS: And we absolutely didn't have time to think about the stuff that they didn't even know to ask for yet. The things that would really make a difference for them, really add value to their experience and make them want to come back to Emerald. We were not even anywhere near that. So to be ready for the future and to prepare for the unknown, we realized that what we were actually going to have to do was go back to basics and probably double down.
NATALIE JACOBS: We had to have some really hard conversations across the business and remind ourselves of our core purpose. We are a publisher. That's what we're here for. We're here to publish impactful research. We're here to drive societal change. That's where we can add the value. That's our sweet spot. That's where we can make a difference and optimize for customer experience.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I guess we needed to feel like we could be comfortable with our place in the research ecosystem. What it turns out that we weren't was a technology company, and that's probably what we were trying to do. We were trying to do everything ourselves, build every solution ourselves, take control and do it all. And I think in resetting and realigning to that purpose, it meant that we were thinking really carefully about every stage in the process of our end-to-end.
NATALIE JACOBS: What's our value add? What do we bring to the table? What's unique for us and what actually could someone else do? And that drive for operational simplicity, I guess, was giving us the opportunity to think about creating space within our resources, within our capacity, and actually maybe think about the fact that if we're built on rocky foundations, then we can't really build successfully for the future.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I think what we were really trying to achieve at the time, and what our reset was trying to move us towards was to be a much more anticipatory organization. We were very reactive. Something happened, everybody swarmed on it. And we were brilliant. We were great in a crisis. I think our launch day showed us this. Everybody felt it was really anticlimactic because it kind of went, OK, there was no drama.
NATALIE JACOBS: There was nothing to jump on. And everybody was like, oh, all right then. We don't really know what to do now. And so we really wanted to be able to create that space for the future and to think about it, not to always be reacting in the moment, and to be able to respond with a level of flexibility so that we could move and do something without it grinding the entire rest of the business to a halt, because that's what was happening.
NATALIE JACOBS: We would swarm and put everybody on something, but it meant that other stuff had to suffer. So I think at this point, we were kind of looking back and saying, well, if we look at our previous decisions, like going ahead and building our own proprietary platform, are we just saying that that was a failure? Like, was that a really bad choice? But I think it gave us the opportunity to embrace the fact that actually, sometimes failure means learning.
NATALIE JACOBS: And that's the most important thing that you need to take out of it, that learning. You've got to be able to acknowledge the wrong turns. You've got to be able to accept them as a wrong term in order to pivot and be on to the right thing. And having that transparent culture with our organization and being really open with them, which we were from the very beginning when we decided that we were going to move off our proprietary platform-- we did tell everybody, even those who were going to be negatively impacted by it-- has been something that I think has been really positive for us.
NATALIE JACOBS: And to be able to reflect openly with the business that what was the right decision for us at one point-- it did make sense. It was the right thing for us to do. It's OK to say that now we're somewhere else. We're somewhere different. The world has changed and this isn't the right thing for us anymore. And I think that's what's giving us the opportunity to get people comfortable with that change and to pivoting, to feel that we are all in it together.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that showed up really nicely. We had a celebration last week to end this big program of work, our launch, and even people who might not have agreed with the decision, the people who had built our own platform and who were probably exiting the business very quickly afterwards kind of were proud of the result. They were proud of how we'd all come together and made this decision and responded to it and move forward.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that transparency was what got us there. So how to make that happen, though? I mean, it sounds great. We've made a decision. Brilliant. We're still at anchor. It's not really going to be something that's just going to happen overnight. And I think one of the first conclusions that we came to was that we're going to have to think differently about technology for this to work.
NATALIE JACOBS: We needed to embrace it as something that was going to enable us, to empower us towards innovation, scalability and agility. And I think for us, that meant a really massive mindset shift. We needed to think about getting the most out of technology and not bending the technology to our will, which I think is a bit of an Emerald thing. We've got a very small history of taking something off the shelf and then butchering it to within an inch of its life so it's not really very usable anymore.
NATALIE JACOBS: You can't sustain it, you can't upgrade it, and we tried to learn some very hard lessons for that when we were going with our new platform. But I think we felt that this is what was going to help us with the competing challenges. We need to get the balance right. We ourselves need to focus on our customers, what matters to them, to the value add that we can bring, not the stuff that's just going to keep the lights on.
NATALIE JACOBS: Not the BAU, not the stuff that other people are specialists at-- partners who are specialists in their own place who can bring that to the table. And I think this realization was, maybe if we get this right, we don't have to compromise, we don't have to trade off the core with the new and the shiny, and we can have it both. Our journey with Silverchair, I think, is an illustration of this.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I know today is not about me talking about Silverchair, but I can't really talk about our journey without talking about what we've done with Silverchair. When I first got to Emerald and that new platform launch was happening, I had a massive long list of roadmap items, things that were very much supporting our product, or our authors, or commercial efforts. There was a slightly small slash large overspill of things that got descoped for launch that were just waiting to be done.
NATALIE JACOBS: I'm sure everybody's been there at some point or another. Everything was focused on the customer. Everything was stuff they were asking us for or demanding and that we still needed to deliver. But unfortunately, all of this was essentially in a big snake-like queue behind keeping the lights on. And trying to be a technology company, we had not really anticipated what it takes just to stand still, just to keep things up and running, just to make sure it stayed up.
NATALIE JACOBS: And everything was getting jostled together. Everything for the platform, everything for the rest of the business, it was in this massive queue, probably barely seeing the light of day, let alone anything getting to the top of it. And the idea of even talking to customers about something brand new was like, yeah, we're never going to get there. We can't even deliver for our front end customers. How are we going to start delivering on a brand new author experience or editor experience to change things in a new open access world?
NATALIE JACOBS: It was just not even feasible. And yeah, I think the journey that we went on with thinking about the platform, I think we realized that if we embrace this the right way, if we think-- and I think my team and [INAUDIBLE] are probably-- I think this was on the list of phrases I never want to hear again after the program. If we configured rather than customized, we could potentially have it all.
NATALIE JACOBS: It didn't have to be like our previous experiences where we built our own platform in the first place, where we had no say, we had no control, we didn't feel like we could pivot or move. And quite ironically, the whole reason for us building our own platform was because we thought that would make us more agile. We thought it would give us the flexibility to respond to our customers quickly and effectively, and it actually made us a lot worse off because we hadn't anticipated what that was going to mean.
NATALIE JACOBS: And this first step, our launch, I actually went back about a month or so before we launched, and I went back to that road map and looked at everything that was on the list, because we were doing some sales stuff and trying to talk to the team about not just what we were launching and what we were getting, but how we'd leapt forward just by moving platform. And to just sit there and be able to say, right, well, that's already there, that's there, that's there, that's done on this whole list of things just from moving platform was just a little bit overwhelming actually.
NATALIE JACOBS: I think it brought home, for the rest of the organization, quite the value of partnership and what we were getting by not trying to do everything ourselves, and that actually, that could be a significantly more successful than us being in control of everything. And I think that being part of the community as well, with some consensus on what is needed to drive things forward, is really important. You've got to choose your partners wisely and you've got to trust them to do the right thing.
NATALIE JACOBS: But I think that inevitably, we need to be driven by our customers and how we can best deliver on that. And I think sometimes we've had to hold our team to account on aligning a little bit to a collective vision and a collective community. Just because we've heard from one customer that they might want to do it differently doesn't mean that we should.
NATALIE JACOBS: We have to be very clear on the strategic value of deviating and regularly reminding everybody that just because we don't respond to every single customer in the way that they want, it doesn't make us not customer-centric. It doesn't mean that we're not a customer-focused organization focused on value. But not delivering on those basics ourselves has given us the opportunity to be looking ahead, to be thinking about what else we can do, how else we can deliver for our customers, and to really push ourselves and drive ourselves forward in a way that I don't think we would have been able to do before.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I won't pretend that we're there. I think we've still got quite a long way to go on our internal technology journey. The team that have worked on our platform launch are already moving on to our next project. They're really excited about it. They're going to upgrade CRM. Real enthusiasm across the business for that.
NATALIE JACOBS: Our bird codename project is really not helping to bring any more enthusiasm to any of this than talking about CRM. Talking about swan is really not helping to pretend to anybody that this is going to be a massively exciting project. But we're still there. We're still working on the change culture and the mindset, and I think that that's a really key thing that we're definitely not there with, but it's something that I think is critical for us to be optimized for the future and to continue to deliver on that value for customers.
NATALIE JACOBS: We're trying to lead as a business with programs of change that are centrally managed, but we're also trying to encourage that level of change across the organization and across teams, giving them the impetus to drive self-led change, because even a small change, even some optimization or to stop doing something that doesn't add value gives them space to do something better, to do something that is going to drive us forward as an organization.
NATALIE JACOBS: And encouraging and celebrating those who are innovative, even in small ways, is something that we're really trying to call out across the business to try and get that built in at a base level in terms of behaviors, in terms of thinking about brand new, shiny opportunities for growth, but also just solving the problems that are holding us back or slowing us down because that means that there is more space for new and more space for something exciting.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think championing and celebrating those behaviors is something that we're trying to get right. We're definitely, definitely not there yet, but at least we're on the journey. And I think that to really drive acceleration and innovation and growth, we've had to go on this. And continually thinking about how we teach the basics and get those right, whilst also leaping forward through strategic choice, is, I think, how we're going to create that space and capacity to pivot towards that unknown futures.
NATALIE JACOBS: I won't say we're perfect. I have a long list of things I'd like to solve. Different versions of truth, different data in different systems. A perfect customer 360 would be very much a positive for me. And they are still on the horizon, but I think we're at least taking the first step to do it. A couple of years ago, I think we were so paralyzed by having so much to do that we were never trying anything new.
NATALIE JACOBS: And even though we've launched our own platform this year, we're also in a position where we are looking at utilizing AI responsibly across our business, looking at how we can drive efficiencies. We are partnering with new AI tools. We've just signed a pilot with Hum. We are piloting new research integrity tools. A couple of years ago, that would have been absolutely unthinkable for us because it would have just been lost in a swarm of other things and someone saying, well, if I do that, then I can't do BAU.
NATALIE JACOBS: We're not going to publish enough articles because I'm too busy running off and trying to do this pilot. And I think that the culture change and the mindset change, as well as the foundational work on the technology systems, is what is hopefully getting us there. So still a way to go, but hopefully it's working. So just to round us out, I think it's important to reflect on the fact that I don't think you can underestimate that culture and mindset shift.
NATALIE JACOBS: We do need to bring people on the journey, and I think that's something that we've tried to get right and definitely not always landed. When we first told the business that we were going to move off our proprietary platform and back onto a third party, there was a range of responses. There was definitely some eye rolling and a little bit of a, oh, not that again, because we've been round and around the circles with this so many times.
NATALIE JACOBS: There was some excitement, probably mostly from my team, because they actually thought maybe we would start to get some stuff done if this happened. And a lot of, well, what's going to be different this time? Like, we've done this before. We've been here. It feels like we're back on this point in the wheel where, oh, we've done it ourselves and now we're going to do it with someone else.
NATALIE JACOBS: Why should we buy into this? Why should it be any different? And that's taken a lot of work, I think, for us to get that buy-in across the organization. It's been a lot of selling the story, the vision, really reinforcing the benefit that we would think we were going to get and why we have felt that this was so, so important. It's been something that we've had to continually reinforce for the two years maybe.
NATALIE JACOBS: I feel like I've been on this for longer. It's only two years. And I think reminding everybody at the heart of what we do is about our customers has been really important, because we've got so many people who have been so frustrated that we haven't been able to do anything. We haven't been able to respond. And linking that change back to, well, this is how we're going to do it, this is how we're going to give you the space to do that thing you're saying you need to do to open something up and through this automation or change, it's going to change that, that's been I think, what's really landed with people.
NATALIE JACOBS: It's quite a mission-driven organization. We have got people who really, really care about our organization and our people and our purpose. And that's really important for us as an organization for what we do and how we're successful. But it does mean that they can get a little bit wedded to things. They think that we made the right decision and having that level of acceptance that it's OK to go back on something, or to pivot, or to change and that it was right then but wrong now is OK.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that's something that they're all really trying to respond and to come on the journey with. I think it does mean that they struggle to accept anything other than perfection, which makes it quite difficult when you know that that's never going to be achievable. You can't please everybody all of the time. And I think that definition of perfection is also something that gets a little bit warped.
NATALIE JACOBS: In doing this work on our backend systems, we've got to the point where I think we've identified processes that are held together with sticky tape and glue, and they've been that way for so long that people are almost so proud of their work around. They're so wedded to it that they don't want to give it up. And it's like, well, you've been complaining about this for so many years and now I'm offering to solve this entire problem for you and to fix it and make it automated.
NATALIE JACOBS: And they don't want it anymore. They're kind of a bit-- oh, well, what am I going to do if that's being done over there? Where do I add value? And I think getting that cultural shift and change to help people realize that it's OK to let go of things because there's still value for you to add, you can move on to something else, there's more that we can do as an organization, and to reinforce that has been so important for getting everybody on board and celebrating the wins and championing positive change when it happens, because I think without the people-- and we just did some awards for the work.
NATALIE JACOBS: We were talking about people who were 24/7 wonders. A lot of time and effort went into this, but without those people, we wouldn't be here. So we're not quite the speedboat yet, but hopefully we're not a tanker anymore either. And we're somewhere on that journey between the two. And I think that whether we and our organizations feel like we're getting pummeled by constant changes and feeling kind of downhearted by that, or whether we feel like we're invigorated by the opportunities that are out there, the reality is that I don't think that change is going away, and the only thing that we can do is learn to cope with it and to be ready for it.
NATALIE JACOBS: Being prepared does mean something different for every organization, I think, and staying true to the mission and the purpose that we have as publishers and partners, I think, is going to be the key thing for us to drive that forward. I've personally always felt that if I look around at the people I work with or the organizations I'm working with, the most successful, but I think also the happiest, seem to be the people who are embracing the change.
NATALIE JACOBS: So driving for that adaptability and flexibility to manage those pitfalls, to be resilient in the face of change-- and who knows what that change is going to be for our academic landscape? I think if we don't respond to that, we're going to be left behind. Whether it's paper mills, whether it's AI, if we try and avoid it, then we're not going to survive, basically.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I think without addressing the customer need and knowing that they don't even know what that is, we need to be able to respond. We need to be future ready. And I think taking it back to that operational simplicity and embarking on that journey of resetting the value is what's going to make the difference. And I'm done. [APPLAUSE] I'm out of time.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: [INAUDIBLE] question?
NATALIE JACOBS: Yeah.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: I think we have time for a couple questions.
NATALIE JACOBS: OK.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: We've got some mics if anybody has a question.
NATALIE JACOBS: I'll take my glasses off so I can see people.
GREG SAGAN: Thanks. Hi. Greg Sagan from Montara. First of all, as someone who represents a service company, I have to say, we really hate it when publishers decide to do everything themselves. [LAUGHING] That being said, before I moved over to the vendor side, I was on the publisher side, primarily production, and was involved in a couple of initiatives where the decision was made to let's build this thing ourselves.
GREG SAGAN: And what I found, and I'm interested to know if you had the same experience, was that you took people and you said, well, you can do your regular job and then devote x amount of time to this new initiative. And that didn't work in either case. So I'm wondering if you had that experience as well.
NATALIE JACOBS: Yeah. We did. We were quite lucky to have business support, so we were able to put quite a lot of people on this project. 100%. But I think one of the things we learned is that there are particularly a lot of people in our organization who don't necessarily trust others to do stuff. So we had quite a lot of people who said, I don't want to backfill, I don't want to step out of my day job, I don't want to step away from that, and tried to do both.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that we've just done a big program of lessons learned on this program so that we can take that forward into the next one. And one of the things that we have decided-- well, reflected on is that at the sponsor level, we need to take more control of that and more ownership. It shouldn't be down to an individual to decide that they don't think they need backfill. We need to take responsibility for that as an organization.
NATALIE JACOBS: We need to say, you can't do both, and if you try and do both, then that's potentially going to hold us back as an organization so we need to push that forward. Not everyone's going to be happy with that. We definitely had some pinch points. I think the 24/7 award went to a couple of people who probably didn't want backfills and tried to do everything. But we definitely relied not just on internal staff for this, though.
NATALIE JACOBS: We worked with a number of partners, both specifically for this opportunity and long-term partners like our content vendors. So we definitely couldn't have done it on our own.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: Great. Well, I think we are at time, but thank you so much, Natalie. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE HANSEN: So we'll go ahead and kick off. All right. Well, welcome, everyone, to Platform Strategies 2025. My name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen I'm the VP of marketing at Silverchair. You've received a lot of emails from me. And I'm just going to cover some quick logistics before I hand it over to Will Schweitzer to kick us off. So first, we're very excited to have you with us today, returning to the Eden.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: I see a lot of familiar faces. So hopefully you know your way around, but I'll just cover a few of these things just to get us started. You can find a map of the venue. You can find the full agenda. You can ask questions, all the stuff, in the event app. So that's going to be key to navigating the day. We have some polls and things like that.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: You can also ask questions throughout the day. We'll have mic runners. And we definitely enjoy a lot of engagement at this event, so we encourage you to take advantage of that. If you need another reason to download the app, there is an Easter egg, so please find me if you find it. Today's sessions are being recorded and will be made publicly available after the event. Returning attendees know that we always like to offer something kind of fun.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: We had a little bit creepy AI photo booth last year. We had a live sketch artist one year. So this year, what we have is we're trying to capture the odd moment we find ourselves in by creating a time capsule. So there are buttons you can fill in. There's a little instax photos and predictions. So feel free to do those during the breaks or lunch, and we will revisit them next year and see what came true.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: And then finally, I just want to thank our sponsors for the event. Digital Science, our charging station sponsor, if you need your phone charged throughout the day. OpenAthens, our morning break sponsor. Access Innovations, our afternoon break sponsor. DCL, who sponsored the lovely breakfast that you just had, and Hum, our lunch sponsor. So thank you all for supporting this meeting.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: And with that, I'm going to kick it over to Will Schweitzer, Silverchair CEO. [APPLAUSE]
WILL SCHWEITZER: Good morning. If it's strategies in D.C., it is raining. Sorry we can't control the weather. I hope nobody gets drenched. So we haven't met. I'm Will Schweitzer. I'm Silverchair's CEO. I've been with the company now for six years. And thank you for joining us. We really appreciate everyone coming.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And in the next 15 minutes, I'm going to try to set the stage for today's program. Maybe stir the pot. You could think of it as an amuse-bouche. Just want to try to expand our thinking a bit. And I'd like to start with our collective state of mind. I don't always agree with Janan Ganesh, who's a columnist for The Financial Times, but he makes me think. And three weeks ago, he wrote that, "at some point, being smart and worried became conterminous.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Pessimism is now a shortcut to intellectual respectability, much like using orchestra in a pop song or filming in black and white." Now, his job is to get clicks, and empathy really doesn't do that. But the whole point of this, his whole point, kind of stayed with me. And it leads me to this invocation for the day, which is have the audacity not to mope, which was the title of this piece, but to leave the office and your worries behind today, to think expansively about the future.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We know one thing with all the challenges that we're facing, which is our mission and our content matters more now than ever. And that is an incredible promise and obligation many of us have. We'll talk a lot about AI today and how AI stands to transform almost every part of what we do. It's anybody's bet how fast that is going to happen, but I'm betting our dollars, it's going to happen faster than open access has transformed this industry.
WILL SCHWEITZER: For our life scientists and biology publishers or researchers in the room, I think we're at a cladogenetic moment, where we'll end up with two different types of publishers-- the AI-adapted and the aggregated imprint. And I know what side of the divide I'd rather be on. The one thing we'd like to encourage today and that we try to do what Silverchair generally is to support pragmatic and ethical and responsible experimentation and adaptation.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I think that's something all of us in the room need to be doing. And if this wasn't cheerleader enough, which I was accused of being last year for scholarly publishing, we can turn to our rapid laureate for some inspiration. And with that, let me start previewing the program. Natalie Jacobs, Emerald's Chief Product Officer, is giving our opening keynote this morning. I'm really excited to hear her talk about publisher and technology readiness.
WILL SCHWEITZER: When we were preparing, kind of getting ready and sharing some ideas, Natalie was previewing her talk, I was reminded of Prahalad and Hamel's Core Competency Theory. And when we consider that AI can transform so many aspects of our workflow, how we relate to our end users and our stakeholders, I think it leads me to this core competency question, which is when we can transform so much of what we do, what is the highest and best use of our capability?
WILL SCHWEITZER: How should we be redeploying our talent and our intellectual property to sustain our missions? I hope Natalie has a few answers for us later this morning. Following Natalie, we'll hear from Mia Ritchie at AGU, Jay Brodsky at AAAS, and Casper Grathwohl from OUP on why our missions remain important and how we can continue fulfilling them. Given the shifts that we're seeing in the market, Theodore Levitt's timeless words seem worth revisiting.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I'll promise I will stop referencing the Harvard Business Review right here. But if you haven't read Marketing Myopia, it is worth 15 minutes of your time, particularly as we're grappling with all of this change and strategic questions. I was slowly warming you all up to very, very dense data slides. And please don't worry, I'm not going to talk through all of them.
WILL SCHWEITZER: But following that panel-- and this is a bit of programming genius from my colleague Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen-- we'll hear from two researchers. We'll hear from Dr. Irene Newton, who's a professor of biology at Indiana, a AAAS fellow, an Editor in Chief of an ASM journal, and we'll hear from Donnie Prasad, who's a doctoral candidate at Cornell. We've asked them for their candid thoughts about publishers, our platforms, and their workflow.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And what this data on the screen from OUP and Wiley suggests, and our own internal data from the Silverchair platform, is that AI is being readily adopted, and it is changing how scholarly content is created, reviewed, discovered, and consumed. I've come to view kind of LLM agents as a complementary for now distribution channel. And as you head into the sessions today, my one perspective is this-- your audience is moving, your stakeholders are adapting, and you should consider meeting them.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I know that's fraught. Following that, we'll hear from my far more colorful, entertaining and brilliant colleague Stuart Leach, Silverchair's CTO. Stuart's talk this afternoon is a continuation of his 2023 keynote, and he'll share his thoughts on how AI is transforming platform strategies and our work within Silverchair. We're going to pull the curtain back a bit to talk about how we approach software development and how you can approach your job, even if you're a business user, not a technologist or a product manager.
WILL SCHWEITZER: There's two bits of perspective I'd like to offer as a preview to Stu's talk. One is, regardless of whether you think AI is hype or we are in a bubble, and there's good data to suggest we're facing really precarious market conditions, the sheer amount of capital being deployed in the economy writ large. And then even within our market, when you look at the dollars here that Wiley or Elsevier or others are spending in research and development means that there will be lasting seen behavioral and infrastructure and product advances in our market.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're at a point where you can no longer afford to ignore this. And if you haven't started experimenting, you should. The second bit of perspective is this-- our workforce, much like researchers, are ready, if not eager, to embrace AI tooling. On the left is data from a McKenzie workforce survey from earlier this year that was really helpful to me in running our now 260-person company. The data suggests that our employees expect us to provide AI tooling to help them do their jobs, that they are ready for professional learning and development.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And on the right-hand side is our internal data. Silverchair has now rolled out Claude Code or Claude Desktop to every Silverchairian in the company, and we are rolling out kind of organizational wide learning and development, socialization, and reinforcement activities. Our early results are promising, but it speaks to our intention and our investment that we believe this technology is here to stay, and it can make us more valuable partners and more effective at our jobs.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm very excited for our closing keynote from Andrew Bradford, who's a professor at Columbia University. She's an expert in digital regulation and the global economy, and particularly the EU's regulatory power. And if you've read anything about the Eu's approach to AI or technology, you now know that it stands in stark contrast to that here in the United States.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So it should be a really interesting talk. I'll end here the preview with some data from Christos Petrou that was in the Scholarly Kitchen, and then our internal white paper from ScholarOne on peer review that underscore long-standing shifts in authoring and reviewing and in researcher behavior are only likely to accelerate given all of the exogenous changes in our market.
WILL SCHWEITZER: When we think about funding shifts, prioritization changes, massive investments that are being made in R&D or in academia, the trends here on this slide are only likely to accelerate. We are likely to see far more AIPAC journals, more papers, and a change in the mix of reviewers and authors across any form of science and scholarship. And I think all of our businesses are going to look very different in five years.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So I hope everyone has had their coffee. It's hopefully going to be a very good and productive day. And again, my colleagues and I are very thankful that you've joined us. You're in our home for the day, or you've been in our home for two days now and maybe for a third. So if there is anything that you need, please ask any Silverchairian. We are here for you.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And as with last year, I'm going to end with asks for everybody here in this room. So given we are all here to share and learn and make connections, my three asks are aligned with Silverchair's values and they are-- assumed positive intent throughout the day. When I read some industry blogs, or I look at posts in Scholarly Kitchen, or I look at exchanges in LinkedIn, there's a lot of armchair quarterbacking.
WILL SCHWEITZER: There's a lot of folks that are complaining that a survey wasn't perfect, or we shouldn't be trying a slight tweak, say, on an open access business model. That isn't helpful to anyone. And if we assume that folks are trying to fulfill their mission, that they're making an earnest effort to adapt and figure out what works for their business, it should be applauded. And the same applies for everyone contributing today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Which takes me to my second ask of you all-- contribute generously. Everyone in this room has a unique perspective on the challenges we're seeing in the industry. You have data from your programs. You have experience working with your stakeholders. In times like this, we need to help each other out. So if you have a thought, if you have feedback, if you have a question, please don't hesitate to grab the microphone, or use the app, or talk to a member of the team today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And my last ask is meet somebody new. A compliment can go a really long way. There are a lot of new faces in the room today, kind of reflecting our growing community, which is really exciting. So we don't want anybody to leave a stranger. You never know where a relationship in this industry can take you. And then speaking of compliments, I'm going to hand it over to the best mustache in scholarly publishing and my good friend Dustin Smith to introduce our keynote speaker.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you, Dustin. [APPLAUSE]
DUSTIN SMITH: Good morning. That's very generous. I mean, Teo's over there, OK? So I'm Dustin Smith. I'm co-founder, CEO, and informally Chief of Stash at Hum. We're building the intelligence layer for publishers, which is an ambitious thing to say right in front of Will Schweitzer, through the alchemist suite of products.
DUSTIN SMITH: And we're deep in AI and we have been for years now. The modern wave of AI is now truly cresting. And if we think back seven years ago, six years ago to platform strategies, it felt like people were playing a somewhat fixed game. You were playing it with more fewer resources, but ultimately, the game board was kind of fixed and you were tweaking around the edges. And that was really the later stages of digital transformation.
DUSTIN SMITH: We're now in the early stages of AI transformation. Obviously, we'll say AI so many times up here today. But it's really exciting. Fundamentally, the game board is changing. It's evolving. And people, I think, will grant, even if you're more conservative, that AI transformation is going to be at least as big as digital transformation. But it's quite possible it will be as big as electricity.
DUSTIN SMITH: And so mental work will go the way that some of the physical work had gone in the incident of electricity. And maybe it'll be as big as agriculture. So ultimately, civilization-level change. On any of those horizons, there's quite a bit of change coming, and anybody who's working at the coalface feels model drops, the evolution in architecture, the rapid pace of change such that you just have to hold on.
DUSTIN SMITH: And so it's my pleasure to introduce Natalie Jacobs from Emerald, who's going to talk about how you're adaptive and how you can hold on for the ride. So thanks so much. [APPLAUSE]
NATALIE JACOBS: Hi, everybody. I feel like I don't need to introduce myself now because two people have introduced me and it feels really weird to tell you my name again. But in prepping for this, I realized that I don't think I've done a face-to-face for more than about five minutes since pre-pandemic. So I don't have my screens for security. I do not have a cat running behind me to distract you, and I need a minute to take time, so hopefully you'll be kind to me and bear with me as I embrace the fact that I can see the whites of your eyes and that's a little bit disconcerting.
NATALIE JACOBS: But anyway, we're here today to talk about readiness for the future of publishing. So the phrase "change is the only constant," whether it's attributed to Franklin or someone else, because the internet was not clear on this, by the way, I think has been a really red thread through my career, from back when I started as an educational publisher over many, many years ago now. And it's got to the point where it feels like a bit of a cliché.
NATALIE JACOBS: I feel like I say it all the time, but unfortunately, the pace of change seems to be drastically accelerating. The last few years, I think we haven't really stopped. It's been something coming at us from every direction, every day, every week, it seems. And while some things have not changed, the fact that the PDF still seems to be king is slightly traumatizing for me at least, particularly given the lack of optimization of accessibility and discoverability and everything else that we know is good and valuable.
NATALIE JACOBS: It still feels like we're getting pummeled from all sides. And that seems to be true for everybody. It doesn't matter if we're small or large, if we're not for profit, if we're commercial. I think some days it feels a little bit like there's no escape. So I'm just going to spend today talking a little bit about some thoughts on this and how we at Emerald have been trying to prepare ourselves and put ourselves in a place where we can cope with the change waves that keep hitting because I think if we reflect on where we've got to, I don't think, even a few years ago, we could have been prepared for just the kind of magnitude of the integrity crisis that we're facing.
NATALIE JACOBS: I don't think we could have anticipated the situation that we've got here in the US, with the threats to international collaboration, to certain areas of research, really just being in dire straits, to be honest. And that is causing a ripple effect across every market, not just here, in terms of the impact. All that, whether you want it to or not, AI is transforming everything we do. I don't think we can have a conversation without having AI in there at this point.
NATALIE JACOBS: So you might be hoping that I'm going to stand here and I'm going to share my views on exactly where the future of publishing is going. Sure, we've all got our own ideas-- that silver bullet that's going to drive success us or the unicorn that's going to solve every single one of our problems. And that would be really lovely. I'd really love to do that for you.
NATALIE JACOBS: It's probably not that easy, though, at this point. And I think the only honest answer that we've got-- oh, it's sliding ahead. Sorry. The only honest answer that we've got is that the future is too uncertain at the moment. We can't really anticipate what's going to happen. There's so much change. The pace is ever increasing.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I don't even think we've got to feel that there's stabilization on the horizon. We can't look ahead and see that there's clear skies or a light at the end of the tunnel. And the future itself, I think, is going to be different for each one of us. And I think that that's true for us as an industry, but the thing that makes it particularly hard for us is that it's also true and potentially worse for every single one of our customers, whether they're people buying content to consume, whether they are the ones trying to produce it.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that critically, it's going to be really hard for us to be in a position to anticipate and deliver on solutions for the future for them because we don't really know what they want and they don't know what they need yet. They can't really also anticipate what's coming for the next few years. And I think they are also trying to keep up with this constant evolution, not really sure where to turn or what's going to happen next.
NATALIE JACOBS: And they've obviously got a slightly different lens on it, whether it's budgets, whether it's funding, changing economics, political instability, but all that impact is going to change their needs and their decisions. And inevitably, I think that we're going to have to prepare for a future that we're not really sure about, and we don't know what that is going to look like.
NATALIE JACOBS: I think the one thing that stands out, though, and I think that we should feel lucky about, is that it has at least remained constant for us that our industry, education and research does largely, maybe not from everybody, remain valued. I don't think we feel like HE or research as a whole is going to disappear. But we do take our lead from our customers and they're slow to change, they're slow to innovate, and that means that we are also slow to innovate because we don't want to bite the hand that feeds us, and we want to keep pace with them.
NATALIE JACOBS: But we probably could be doing more to guide them and to lead them in this if we can create the space to do that and give ourselves some time. So with the best will in the world, even if we think we know what we need to do and are planning for the future, the future often has other ideas. Does anybody know where this is?
NATALIE JACOBS: I'm sorry if you've seen this example before. No? Excuse my pronunciation because I might get this wrong. I think this is called Choluteca bridge. It's in Honduras. I've probably butchered how to pronounce it. But it was, at one point, considered one of the great architectural works in Honduras. And it was built to replicate the Golden Gate Bridge and to control the flow of traffic from Guatemala to Panama.
NATALIE JACOBS: And back in the 1990s, a second bridge was built because this one was getting pummeled. There's lots of weather conditions, there's challenges, and it was suffering. So a new bridge that was designed to be completely indestructible was built. And in the same year that it was commissioned, Honduras got hit by a massive hurricane. And true to form, this bridge was really badly damaged.
NATALIE JACOBS: It was almost destroyed. There was loads of impact on infrastructure, but the new bridge survived. It was indestructible. It had come through the storm. It had all been a success, the planning had paid off and the future proofing has worked. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Well, not in practice because this is that bridge today.
NATALIE JACOBS: This bridge has absolutely no roads whatsoever because as a result of the hurricane and the massive flooding that came with it, the river carved itself a completely new channel. It washed out all of the roads and everything. So it's now just a bridge to nowhere that probably cost a lot of money. And I think for me, this really represents the risk that we are facing right now with the changes and shifts that we are seeing at every turn.
NATALIE JACOBS: Something like paper mills where we respond, they respond. Like, every time we do something, they seem to get ahead of us again. We've got to be realistic that we can't foresee everything and we have to be ready. But I think the last thing that we really want to do is to be this bridge and to be left in the middle of nowhere. So we're going to have to foster some agility, some adaptability and probably most importantly, some resilience so that we're in a position to respond to changes as they come and be in a position to embrace the transformative opportunities that I think can come with change.
NATALIE JACOBS: Any of you who know Louise Russell? I stole this from my colleague, but I think she stole it from Louise. So if you've seen it before, thanks to Louise. So that does all sound a bit depressing. I don't think we want to build a bridge that goes to nowhere. And even if we plan and we do things right, I think we have to be honest that we could end up in a dead end.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that we need to be comfortable that that's OK, but we need to do something about it. So where we've landed at Emerald is that we are trying to focus on ways to prepare for the unknown unknowns, the things that we can't really get ahead of, we can't be sure what's coming, and to think about the impact that they could have and to put ourselves in a position to respond as quickly and effectively as we can.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I'll just pause for a minute. I'll do a very quick elevator pitch. Sorry. Obviously representing Emerald, have to do this. So for those of you that don't know us, we are a mission-led social sciences publisher. We have journals, we have books and cases, and we focus on research specifically that tackles societal challenges.
NATALIE JACOBS: So we're here to really drive change. Change to lives, change the world, and make a very positive difference with the impact of the research that we publish. We've got a very strong customer footprint across Asia and also EMEA, and a growing position in the Americas, although current challenges notwithstanding, maybe. But I think most importantly, for the purposes of what we're talking about today, is that I think we're realistically, at best, a medium-sized publisher.
NATALIE JACOBS: We need to be comfortable with that. That's not to say that we don't have big ambitions, not to say that we don't want to be doing more, and that we're trying to be more than we are and drive more than our size. But I think over the last couple of years, it's been really clear that our sheer capacity to deliver on the business initiatives that we want or respond to our customers, our industry has kind of been stalling a little bit, and that's something that we needed to do something about.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I'm going to take you back, pre-pandemic, back when I first joined emerald. I was very shiny and new and fresh faced, obviously, coming into the organization. I felt like everything was in a really good place. We'd got everything in hand. The week I joined, we launched our own proprietary platform. Not the best week to start in a new job, by the way, when everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
NATALIE JACOBS: But we were talking about some of the big ticket items that we needed to face into as a business. We were thinking about being future ready. We'd just done this massive platform launch. We were in the right place. We were in control of our own destiny. Everything was brilliant. And then obviously, the pandemic hit, and it reminded us that the world often has other plans when you think you're prepared.
NATALIE JACOBS: So immobilizing our teams for disruption and for the change of the pandemic and what followed, we became really acutely aware of one thing-- our beautiful, well-oiled internal machine turned out to be a tanker and not a speedboat. We were only small. We kind of always felt that our size would be our superpower. We're not too big. We don't have loads of red tape and bureaucracy.
NATALIE JACOBS: We've got people. We're in control of everything. We can just deploy. We should be able to pause, reflect, respond and adjust and be on top of the situation. But none of that was actually really very true in practice, unfortunately. And I think the biggest challenge for us at the time was the balance of keeping the lights on, doing all the core stuff, everything that you can't get away from but nobody really wants to talk about, and actually doing the shiny, the new, the exciting, the preparation for something to come.
NATALIE JACOBS: So we had all this time and resource and effort going on behind the scenes. The boring stuff, I suppose you would say, that if we think about our customer facing platform, it would be the security, the stability, the uptime, accessibility, everything that our customers don't really care to talk about unless it's fallen off a cliff. If something's wrong, they're going to be massively vocal about it.
NATALIE JACOBS: But if you're doing it right, nobody ever really talks about it. And as we tried to respond to these changes, we were having to make decisions on the need that we just had to deliver things. We just had to get stuff out the door. So we were doing things increasingly manually. And it turns out that holding stuff together with sticky tape and glue is not particularly scalable or sustainable.
NATALIE JACOBS: Running things off a spreadsheet is going to catch up and bite you at later date. And we were just spending so much time on holding everything together. And I think more importantly, we were not doing our job to support our customers. We were not getting to the things that they were asking for, that they were demanding. Some of them just even hygiene factors, I'm sure we would say.
NATALIE JACOBS: And we absolutely didn't have time to think about the stuff that they didn't even know to ask for yet. The things that would really make a difference for them, really add value to their experience and make them want to come back to Emerald. We were not even anywhere near that. So to be ready for the future and to prepare for the unknown, we realized that what we were actually going to have to do was go back to basics and probably double down.
NATALIE JACOBS: We had to have some really hard conversations across the business and remind ourselves of our core purpose. We are a publisher. That's what we're here for. We're here to publish impactful research. We're here to drive societal change. That's where we can add the value. That's our sweet spot. That's where we can make a difference and optimize for customer experience.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I guess we needed to feel like we could be comfortable with our place in the research ecosystem. What it turns out that we weren't was a technology company, and that's probably what we were trying to do. We were trying to do everything ourselves, build every solution ourselves, take control and do it all. And I think in resetting and realigning to that purpose, it meant that we were thinking really carefully about every stage in the process of our end-to-end.
NATALIE JACOBS: What's our value add? What do we bring to the table? What's unique for us and what actually could someone else do? And that drive for operational simplicity, I guess, was giving us the opportunity to think about creating space within our resources, within our capacity, and actually maybe think about the fact that if we're built on rocky foundations, then we can't really build successfully for the future.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I think what we were really trying to achieve at the time, and what our reset was trying to move us towards was to be a much more anticipatory organization. We were very reactive. Something happened, everybody swarmed on it. And we were brilliant. We were great in a crisis. I think our launch day showed us this. Everybody felt it was really anticlimactic because it kind of went, OK, there was no drama.
NATALIE JACOBS: There was nothing to jump on. And everybody was like, oh, all right then. We don't really know what to do now. And so we really wanted to be able to create that space for the future and to think about it, not to always be reacting in the moment, and to be able to respond with a level of flexibility so that we could move and do something without it grinding the entire rest of the business to a halt, because that's what was happening.
NATALIE JACOBS: We would swarm and put everybody on something, but it meant that other stuff had to suffer. So I think at this point, we were kind of looking back and saying, well, if we look at our previous decisions, like going ahead and building our own proprietary platform, are we just saying that that was a failure? Like, was that a really bad choice? But I think it gave us the opportunity to embrace the fact that actually, sometimes failure means learning.
NATALIE JACOBS: And that's the most important thing that you need to take out of it, that learning. You've got to be able to acknowledge the wrong turns. You've got to be able to accept them as a wrong term in order to pivot and be on to the right thing. And having that transparent culture with our organization and being really open with them, which we were from the very beginning when we decided that we were going to move off our proprietary platform-- we did tell everybody, even those who were going to be negatively impacted by it-- has been something that I think has been really positive for us.
NATALIE JACOBS: And to be able to reflect openly with the business that what was the right decision for us at one point-- it did make sense. It was the right thing for us to do. It's OK to say that now we're somewhere else. We're somewhere different. The world has changed and this isn't the right thing for us anymore. And I think that's what's giving us the opportunity to get people comfortable with that change and to pivoting, to feel that we are all in it together.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that showed up really nicely. We had a celebration last week to end this big program of work, our launch, and even people who might not have agreed with the decision, the people who had built our own platform and who were probably exiting the business very quickly afterwards kind of were proud of the result. They were proud of how we'd all come together and made this decision and responded to it and move forward.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that transparency was what got us there. So how to make that happen, though? I mean, it sounds great. We've made a decision. Brilliant. We're still at anchor. It's not really going to be something that's just going to happen overnight. And I think one of the first conclusions that we came to was that we're going to have to think differently about technology for this to work.
NATALIE JACOBS: We needed to embrace it as something that was going to enable us, to empower us towards innovation, scalability and agility. And I think for us, that meant a really massive mindset shift. We needed to think about getting the most out of technology and not bending the technology to our will, which I think is a bit of an Emerald thing. We've got a very small history of taking something off the shelf and then butchering it to within an inch of its life so it's not really very usable anymore.
NATALIE JACOBS: You can't sustain it, you can't upgrade it, and we tried to learn some very hard lessons for that when we were going with our new platform. But I think we felt that this is what was going to help us with the competing challenges. We need to get the balance right. We ourselves need to focus on our customers, what matters to them, to the value add that we can bring, not the stuff that's just going to keep the lights on.
NATALIE JACOBS: Not the BAU, not the stuff that other people are specialists at-- partners who are specialists in their own place who can bring that to the table. And I think this realization was, maybe if we get this right, we don't have to compromise, we don't have to trade off the core with the new and the shiny, and we can have it both. Our journey with Silverchair, I think, is an illustration of this.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I know today is not about me talking about Silverchair, but I can't really talk about our journey without talking about what we've done with Silverchair. When I first got to Emerald and that new platform launch was happening, I had a massive long list of roadmap items, things that were very much supporting our product, or our authors, or commercial efforts. There was a slightly small slash large overspill of things that got descoped for launch that were just waiting to be done.
NATALIE JACOBS: I'm sure everybody's been there at some point or another. Everything was focused on the customer. Everything was stuff they were asking us for or demanding and that we still needed to deliver. But unfortunately, all of this was essentially in a big snake-like queue behind keeping the lights on. And trying to be a technology company, we had not really anticipated what it takes just to stand still, just to keep things up and running, just to make sure it stayed up.
NATALIE JACOBS: And everything was getting jostled together. Everything for the platform, everything for the rest of the business, it was in this massive queue, probably barely seeing the light of day, let alone anything getting to the top of it. And the idea of even talking to customers about something brand new was like, yeah, we're never going to get there. We can't even deliver for our front end customers. How are we going to start delivering on a brand new author experience or editor experience to change things in a new open access world?
NATALIE JACOBS: It was just not even feasible. And yeah, I think the journey that we went on with thinking about the platform, I think we realized that if we embrace this the right way, if we think-- and I think my team and [INAUDIBLE] are probably-- I think this was on the list of phrases I never want to hear again after the program. If we configured rather than customized, we could potentially have it all.
NATALIE JACOBS: It didn't have to be like our previous experiences where we built our own platform in the first place, where we had no say, we had no control, we didn't feel like we could pivot or move. And quite ironically, the whole reason for us building our own platform was because we thought that would make us more agile. We thought it would give us the flexibility to respond to our customers quickly and effectively, and it actually made us a lot worse off because we hadn't anticipated what that was going to mean.
NATALIE JACOBS: And this first step, our launch, I actually went back about a month or so before we launched, and I went back to that road map and looked at everything that was on the list, because we were doing some sales stuff and trying to talk to the team about not just what we were launching and what we were getting, but how we'd leapt forward just by moving platform. And to just sit there and be able to say, right, well, that's already there, that's there, that's there, that's done on this whole list of things just from moving platform was just a little bit overwhelming actually.
NATALIE JACOBS: I think it brought home, for the rest of the organization, quite the value of partnership and what we were getting by not trying to do everything ourselves, and that actually, that could be a significantly more successful than us being in control of everything. And I think that being part of the community as well, with some consensus on what is needed to drive things forward, is really important. You've got to choose your partners wisely and you've got to trust them to do the right thing.
NATALIE JACOBS: But I think that inevitably, we need to be driven by our customers and how we can best deliver on that. And I think sometimes we've had to hold our team to account on aligning a little bit to a collective vision and a collective community. Just because we've heard from one customer that they might want to do it differently doesn't mean that we should.
NATALIE JACOBS: We have to be very clear on the strategic value of deviating and regularly reminding everybody that just because we don't respond to every single customer in the way that they want, it doesn't make us not customer-centric. It doesn't mean that we're not a customer-focused organization focused on value. But not delivering on those basics ourselves has given us the opportunity to be looking ahead, to be thinking about what else we can do, how else we can deliver for our customers, and to really push ourselves and drive ourselves forward in a way that I don't think we would have been able to do before.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I won't pretend that we're there. I think we've still got quite a long way to go on our internal technology journey. The team that have worked on our platform launch are already moving on to our next project. They're really excited about it. They're going to upgrade CRM. Real enthusiasm across the business for that.
NATALIE JACOBS: Our bird codename project is really not helping to bring any more enthusiasm to any of this than talking about CRM. Talking about swan is really not helping to pretend to anybody that this is going to be a massively exciting project. But we're still there. We're still working on the change culture and the mindset, and I think that that's a really key thing that we're definitely not there with, but it's something that I think is critical for us to be optimized for the future and to continue to deliver on that value for customers.
NATALIE JACOBS: We're trying to lead as a business with programs of change that are centrally managed, but we're also trying to encourage that level of change across the organization and across teams, giving them the impetus to drive self-led change, because even a small change, even some optimization or to stop doing something that doesn't add value gives them space to do something better, to do something that is going to drive us forward as an organization.
NATALIE JACOBS: And encouraging and celebrating those who are innovative, even in small ways, is something that we're really trying to call out across the business to try and get that built in at a base level in terms of behaviors, in terms of thinking about brand new, shiny opportunities for growth, but also just solving the problems that are holding us back or slowing us down because that means that there is more space for new and more space for something exciting.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think championing and celebrating those behaviors is something that we're trying to get right. We're definitely, definitely not there yet, but at least we're on the journey. And I think that to really drive acceleration and innovation and growth, we've had to go on this. And continually thinking about how we teach the basics and get those right, whilst also leaping forward through strategic choice, is, I think, how we're going to create that space and capacity to pivot towards that unknown futures.
NATALIE JACOBS: I won't say we're perfect. I have a long list of things I'd like to solve. Different versions of truth, different data in different systems. A perfect customer 360 would be very much a positive for me. And they are still on the horizon, but I think we're at least taking the first step to do it. A couple of years ago, I think we were so paralyzed by having so much to do that we were never trying anything new.
NATALIE JACOBS: And even though we've launched our own platform this year, we're also in a position where we are looking at utilizing AI responsibly across our business, looking at how we can drive efficiencies. We are partnering with new AI tools. We've just signed a pilot with Hum. We are piloting new research integrity tools. A couple of years ago, that would have been absolutely unthinkable for us because it would have just been lost in a swarm of other things and someone saying, well, if I do that, then I can't do BAU.
NATALIE JACOBS: We're not going to publish enough articles because I'm too busy running off and trying to do this pilot. And I think that the culture change and the mindset change, as well as the foundational work on the technology systems, is what is hopefully getting us there. So still a way to go, but hopefully it's working. So just to round us out, I think it's important to reflect on the fact that I don't think you can underestimate that culture and mindset shift.
NATALIE JACOBS: We do need to bring people on the journey, and I think that's something that we've tried to get right and definitely not always landed. When we first told the business that we were going to move off our proprietary platform and back onto a third party, there was a range of responses. There was definitely some eye rolling and a little bit of a, oh, not that again, because we've been round and around the circles with this so many times.
NATALIE JACOBS: There was some excitement, probably mostly from my team, because they actually thought maybe we would start to get some stuff done if this happened. And a lot of, well, what's going to be different this time? Like, we've done this before. We've been here. It feels like we're back on this point in the wheel where, oh, we've done it ourselves and now we're going to do it with someone else.
NATALIE JACOBS: Why should we buy into this? Why should it be any different? And that's taken a lot of work, I think, for us to get that buy-in across the organization. It's been a lot of selling the story, the vision, really reinforcing the benefit that we would think we were going to get and why we have felt that this was so, so important. It's been something that we've had to continually reinforce for the two years maybe.
NATALIE JACOBS: I feel like I've been on this for longer. It's only two years. And I think reminding everybody at the heart of what we do is about our customers has been really important, because we've got so many people who have been so frustrated that we haven't been able to do anything. We haven't been able to respond. And linking that change back to, well, this is how we're going to do it, this is how we're going to give you the space to do that thing you're saying you need to do to open something up and through this automation or change, it's going to change that, that's been I think, what's really landed with people.
NATALIE JACOBS: It's quite a mission-driven organization. We have got people who really, really care about our organization and our people and our purpose. And that's really important for us as an organization for what we do and how we're successful. But it does mean that they can get a little bit wedded to things. They think that we made the right decision and having that level of acceptance that it's OK to go back on something, or to pivot, or to change and that it was right then but wrong now is OK.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that's something that they're all really trying to respond and to come on the journey with. I think it does mean that they struggle to accept anything other than perfection, which makes it quite difficult when you know that that's never going to be achievable. You can't please everybody all of the time. And I think that definition of perfection is also something that gets a little bit warped.
NATALIE JACOBS: In doing this work on our backend systems, we've got to the point where I think we've identified processes that are held together with sticky tape and glue, and they've been that way for so long that people are almost so proud of their work around. They're so wedded to it that they don't want to give it up. And it's like, well, you've been complaining about this for so many years and now I'm offering to solve this entire problem for you and to fix it and make it automated.
NATALIE JACOBS: And they don't want it anymore. They're kind of a bit-- oh, well, what am I going to do if that's being done over there? Where do I add value? And I think getting that cultural shift and change to help people realize that it's OK to let go of things because there's still value for you to add, you can move on to something else, there's more that we can do as an organization, and to reinforce that has been so important for getting everybody on board and celebrating the wins and championing positive change when it happens, because I think without the people-- and we just did some awards for the work.
NATALIE JACOBS: We were talking about people who were 24/7 wonders. A lot of time and effort went into this, but without those people, we wouldn't be here. So we're not quite the speedboat yet, but hopefully we're not a tanker anymore either. And we're somewhere on that journey between the two. And I think that whether we and our organizations feel like we're getting pummeled by constant changes and feeling kind of downhearted by that, or whether we feel like we're invigorated by the opportunities that are out there, the reality is that I don't think that change is going away, and the only thing that we can do is learn to cope with it and to be ready for it.
NATALIE JACOBS: Being prepared does mean something different for every organization, I think, and staying true to the mission and the purpose that we have as publishers and partners, I think, is going to be the key thing for us to drive that forward. I've personally always felt that if I look around at the people I work with or the organizations I'm working with, the most successful, but I think also the happiest, seem to be the people who are embracing the change.
NATALIE JACOBS: So driving for that adaptability and flexibility to manage those pitfalls, to be resilient in the face of change-- and who knows what that change is going to be for our academic landscape? I think if we don't respond to that, we're going to be left behind. Whether it's paper mills, whether it's AI, if we try and avoid it, then we're not going to survive, basically.
NATALIE JACOBS: So I think without addressing the customer need and knowing that they don't even know what that is, we need to be able to respond. We need to be future ready. And I think taking it back to that operational simplicity and embarking on that journey of resetting the value is what's going to make the difference. And I'm done. [APPLAUSE] I'm out of time.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: [INAUDIBLE] question?
NATALIE JACOBS: Yeah.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: I think we have time for a couple questions.
NATALIE JACOBS: OK.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: We've got some mics if anybody has a question.
NATALIE JACOBS: I'll take my glasses off so I can see people.
GREG SAGAN: Thanks. Hi. Greg Sagan from Montara. First of all, as someone who represents a service company, I have to say, we really hate it when publishers decide to do everything themselves. [LAUGHING] That being said, before I moved over to the vendor side, I was on the publisher side, primarily production, and was involved in a couple of initiatives where the decision was made to let's build this thing ourselves.
GREG SAGAN: And what I found, and I'm interested to know if you had the same experience, was that you took people and you said, well, you can do your regular job and then devote x amount of time to this new initiative. And that didn't work in either case. So I'm wondering if you had that experience as well.
NATALIE JACOBS: Yeah. We did. We were quite lucky to have business support, so we were able to put quite a lot of people on this project. 100%. But I think one of the things we learned is that there are particularly a lot of people in our organization who don't necessarily trust others to do stuff. So we had quite a lot of people who said, I don't want to backfill, I don't want to step out of my day job, I don't want to step away from that, and tried to do both.
NATALIE JACOBS: And I think that we've just done a big program of lessons learned on this program so that we can take that forward into the next one. And one of the things that we have decided-- well, reflected on is that at the sponsor level, we need to take more control of that and more ownership. It shouldn't be down to an individual to decide that they don't think they need backfill. We need to take responsibility for that as an organization.
NATALIE JACOBS: We need to say, you can't do both, and if you try and do both, then that's potentially going to hold us back as an organization so we need to push that forward. Not everyone's going to be happy with that. We definitely had some pinch points. I think the 24/7 award went to a couple of people who probably didn't want backfills and tried to do everything. But we definitely relied not just on internal staff for this, though.
NATALIE JACOBS: We worked with a number of partners, both specifically for this opportunity and long-term partners like our content vendors. So we definitely couldn't have done it on our own.
STEPHANIE HANSEN: Great. Well, I think we are at time, but thank you so much, Natalie. [APPLAUSE]
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