Mapping Trends in Publishing: Powering Macmillan's Decisions and Discoveries with AI

Driven by Data Applications in AI

Macmillan uses this scraped market data for a variety of purposes from acquisitions to market research and many of those business uses are supported by our AI and ML (Machine Learning) teams which work on top of our data to generate insights and reporting for the business.

I am most excited about leveraging the vast amount of data that resides within Macmillan both internally and that we collect externally to help us run the business more efficiently as well as help us to come to better decisions faster. The number one thing we can do to improve our business performance would be to allow data to help us improve our decision making, track the decisions we make, and improve on them over time.

Tracking Trends: An Exciting Recent Endeavor

We are currently in the middle of an exciting project to understand the performance of every genre on Amazon over the last decade. We think it will be illuminating to watch categories rise and fall in popularity throughout the year and will make longer term trends in genres more apparent, and hopefully allow our publishers to zero in on trends quicker and attract exactly the right authors ahead of the market's tastes.

Anticipation for Future AI Endeavors

Obviously large language models are all the rage these days but I am most interested in more esoteric AI projects that help the world solve problems humans have not yet been able to solve themselves. For example there's a variety of healthcare-focused AI projects that are using vast troves of (non- personally identifiable) data to learn about how to identify diseases and markers for degenerative health situations. It seems like a very exciting way to leverage AI and ML to improve our health and make doctors more effective at low cost.