Publishing Signal
July 22, 2026Archive

Media Transformation Summit — July 2026

Publishing Signal is an industry platform for publishing leaders and transformation operators. The Summit is its first public initiative.

Read the Summit recap
Edition recording

Opening remarks

Sebastian Mayeres6 min

Sebastian Mayeres opens the July 2026 Media Transformation Summit, sets the context for the day, and introduces the questions connecting the sessions.

Sessions

Keynote

Program

Formats and Revenue

Topic

Operations and Technology

Topic

Metadata, SEO and GEO

Topic

Content, Audience and Discovery

Topic
Edition recording

Closing remarks

Sebastian Mayeres6 min

Sebastian Mayeres brings together the Summit’s recurring themes, reflects on what transformation should make easier next time, and looks ahead to the next edition.

Participating speakers

Summit takeaways

What the Summit made clear

Across seven sessions and nine speakers, several conclusions appeared repeatedly. Different perspectives, but a surprisingly consistent picture of where publishing transformation is heading.

  • Transformation is a capability, not a finish line.

    A project matters when it leaves behind reusable foundations, clearer decisions, and teams that can continue improving.

  • Cheaper production increases the importance of judgment.

    Rights, audience, format, timing, channel, and quality become more important when almost anything can technically be produced.

  • Automation quality must be engineered.

    Prompts are not a quality system. Publishers need deterministic checks, semantic review, explicit approval points, and clear accountability.

  • Structured content is becoming operating infrastructure.

    Shared taxonomies, user needs, precise formats, sourcing, and attribution connect editorial intent with product, analytics, and AI-mediated use.

  • AI adoption is an organizational design problem.

    Leadership, middle managers, employees, governance, architecture, incentives, and external partners have to move together.

  • Discoverability is not demand.

    Metadata, SEO, GEO, rich public content, positioning, availability, events, and audience insight work cumulatively.

  • Small experiments are more useful than broad declarations.

    The most credible next step is often a focused test designed to reduce one important uncertainty.

The bottom line

AI is lowering some of the technical and economic barriers in publishing, but it is not removing the need for judgment. It is moving the real bottlenecks toward rights, quality, workflow design, governance, structured data, audience understanding, channel choice, and availability.

The publishers most likely to benefit will not be those attempting to transform everything at once. They will be those that choose focused problems, run bounded experiments, measure honestly, and preserve what they learn. The most useful measure of progress is not how many tools were introduced or how much content was produced. It is whether the organization became better at making the next decision, running the next experiment, and adapting to what actually happened.

Read the full recap
Delivered agenda

The morning, as delivered.

Times shown as delivered — Eastern Time (EDT)
  1. Welcome

    9:00 AMWelcome & Opening

    WITH
    • Sebastian Mayeres, CEO, knk Software LP

    A short opening to frame the Summit, the program, and why practical publishing transformation needs a clearer conversation.

  2. Keynote

    9:10 AMTransformation Is Not a Project: How Publishers Build Change That Lasts

    WITH
    • Amy Jones, Chief Transformation Officer, Emerald Publishing

    Amy Jones explains why transformation should be measured by what an organization can do after a project ends. Strong foundations, small improvements, resilient governance, and practical capability building make the next change easier.

  3. Talk

    9:30 AMBigFiveKiller: Building a Fully Automated Publishing Pipeline with AI

    WITH
    • Fred Zimmerman, Founder, Big Five Killer / Nimble Books

    Fred Zimmerman presents a deliberately provocative experiment in AI-driven publishing: one operator supervising agents, automated production, and layered quality checks. The transferable lesson is not volume for its own sake, but the engineering required to make automation reliable.

  4. Roundtable

    10:00 AMFormats and Revenue: How Publishers Build and Monetize a Multi-Format Business

    WITH
    • Andrew Weinstein, US Country Manager, Bookwire
    • Mohit Srivastava, Strategic Content Partnerships and Licensing, Dashverse

    Andrew Weinstein and Mohit Srivastava explain why cheaper format production does not remove the hard decisions. Rights, audience, channel, release strategy, monetization, and quality determine whether a new audiobook, visual adaptation, or microdrama creates real value.

  5. Talk

    10:40 AMFrom User Needs Model to AI in Multimodal Content Strategies

    WITH
    • Dmitry Shishkin, Independent Media Advisor, Independent

    Dmitry Shishkin argues that AI-ready publishing begins with audience intent and a shared content taxonomy. Topic, user need, and precise format give editorial, product, analytics, and machines a common language for creating and reusing content.

  6. Roundtable

    11:10 AMOperations and Technology: How Modern Publishers Simplify Workflows, Use AI Effectively, and Scale

    WITH
    • Arantza Larrauri, Market Director, Europe and Latin America, De Marque

    Arantza Larrauri explains why AI adoption is an organizational challenge before it is a tool rollout. Leadership learning, practical governance, employee involvement, integration standards, and incentives must move together if experiments are to become reliable workflows.

  7. Talk

    11:50 AMFinding Readers in the AI Era: Why Metadata, SEO & GEO Matter for Trade Publishers

    WITH
    • Sarah Arbuthnot, President, Supadu

    Sarah Arbuthnot explains how complete metadata, authoritative publisher websites, SEO, and GEO work together to make books understandable and recommendable across search engines, retailers, and AI systems.

  8. Roundtable

    12:20 PMContent and Target Audience: How Content Gets Discovered, Positioned, and Connected with the Right Readers

    WITH
    • Emma House, International Publishing Consultant, Emma House Consultancy
    • Thad McIlroy, Technology Analyst and Consultant, The Future of Publishing

    Emma House and Thad McIlroy move the conversation from technical discoverability to audience connection. Rich public information, targeted campaigns, market context, availability, author communities, and real-time signals determine whether the right book actually reaches the right reader.

  9. Closing

    1:00 PMEnd of Conference

    Closing remarks and next steps.

Frequently asked · Archive

Answered for the July 2026 edition.

The Summit was online and ran as a Zoom webinar.