Read the interview or watch the discussion below.
AI's Evolution: From Tool to Environment
When we published our first report in 2022, AI was barely a footnote. By 2025, it dominated every conversation. How has the conversation around AI changed across these reports?SAM: We've shifted from talking about AI as a tool to understanding it as a broader environment. There are still questions about how it should be used and how we should apply it, but we've moved from experimenting with AI to applying it and creating the world we'd like to build. The conversation has become more existential, focused on the evolution of scholarly communication's purpose and what it means to discover, validate, and share knowledge in an AI-mediated world.
LAURA: The conversation around use cases has expanded dramatically. In 2024, we were hearing about small bets and experimenting with individual tools, with everybody trying to see what everybody else was doing. In 2026, we're seeing publishers building sustainable applications and being really considerate about using AI, sometimes completely rebuilding a workflow around AI rather than just tacking it on. That maturity is exciting to see. It means we didn't just get stuck in the peak of inflated expectations on the hype cycle. We're seeing the experiments deliver real ROI.
STEPHANIE: It moved from "whether" to "how." How do we employ this in a way that still preserves the integrity of the work we do as an industry, and how do we make sure it's improving researchers' lives and making things better for those working in scholarly publishing?
Weathering Disruption: What Publishers Can Learn
Some challenges that seemed insurmountable have fallen off future reports altogether, while others have risen in significance. What does this tell us about our industry's ability to handle disruption?LAURA: This says something encouraging about the industry. We may not love disruption, but we're good at metabolizing it. The themes that rise to the top and come back year after year are the deeper core values of publishing—research integrity and trust—and how disruptions influence those things. The key for publishers, especially as disruption feels like it's happening faster than ever, is building systems that are resilient and adaptable. Focus on building infrastructure that lets you move fast and experiment and iterate quickly as the ecosystem continues to shift, because the next big disruption probably isn't the one we're all talking about right now.
STEPHANIE: Sometimes slow and steady does win the race. Our industry has a reputation for being slow-moving, which can be a challenge for innovation, but it also means we don't get carried away with fads and short-term challenges. The healthy debate that exists within our industry means there are always voices pulling us forward while also steadying the ship.
SAM: We've gotten better at weathering technologically-based disruptions. We take a lot of care as an industry in what we're building and why we're building it. The people have remained a constant, whether that's the need for researchers who are always going to need somewhere to publish, scholarly societies that are always going to need to support their research communities, or the professionals themselves who work in the industry and are curious about what's next. You can come up with a new model, you can come up with a new way of doing things, but at the end of the day, the principles are still there and the people are still there.
Data: The Foundation That Everything Else Builds On
Data has consistently been a top trend in every single report. Why does data continue to dominate the conversation, and how do you see its role evolving as AI becomes more integral to publishing workflows?LAURA: This really shows how much data underpins all of the other trends. As everything gets more complex—more content, more channels, higher expectations from authors, more options for what can be done with AI—that infrastructure becomes even more central and important. We're at a time where we're going to see a big discrepancy between the publishers that have taken data seriously for the last few years and those that haven't.
All of the things people are talking about applying AI to today—using AI to support editors or peer reviewers, deploying AI agents—everything depends on having data structured correctly and the ability to actually act on it. You can't deliver a personalized author experience if you don't know who your authors are. You can't triage submissions with AI if your metadata is chaos. Having AI-ready data is a competitive differentiator in 2026. We're going to see some publishers really rise to the top because they've been investing in data infrastructure for years, and they can now implement and test AI more effectively because they have the clean, structured data to do it.
SAM: Data is such a broad term, and it continues to become a bigger umbrella for new things to measure and pay attention to. In addition to needing comprehensive infrastructure around your data, we sometimes struggle with how we use that data. It's almost like a ritual to collect and gather data, but then what you do with it and how you make meaning out of that data is still piecemeal in some places. I'm curious to see how we make use of that data on the other end as AI content discovery makes it even more important.
STEPHANIE: We ultimately trade in information, which is captured in data, so data's always been important, but the type of data has changed and who's consuming the data has changed. We don't just want the research, we want the clean metadata, we want to know how users are accessing it so we can serve them better. And now all that also has to be accessible to AI agents. We still have a long way to go, but people understand how important it is now. I'll be interested to see how we can use AI to gather the data for us so that we're not as tied to really strict formats. Maybe it can help us break open the data by removing some of those format restrictions.
Looking Ahead: Underestimated Trends
As we launch the fifth report, what trend do you think we're underestimating right now that will be obvious next year?SAM: The world is headed for a scary authentication crisis, and the publishing industry is uniquely positioned to play a part in counteracting that. We don't necessarily know whether text or data is AI-generated. Did humans play a role in this? Is the data even real? It's going to become harder to authenticate information across the broader internet, and the value of the information we publish in scholarly communications is going to be even more important. Reality is becoming something that we have to double-check, and I'm interested to see how that plays out.
STEPHANIE: Between the shift to remote as the dominant format and the many ways that AI is transforming the workforce, I think we might look back and be shocked that we weren't doing more as an industry and as a species to actively shape the way that work looks for people. I'm picturing therapists of the future talking with people who feel disconnected because they're not building networks through their jobs the way they once did, or people who feel purposeless because their work is being done by AI agents.
LAURA: One of the questions I'm eager to ask is: As you've introduced AI and automation to your workflows, how are you reinvesting human time? There's a great fear that AI is going to make us all lazier, dumber, and less engaged with the work. But on the more optimistic end—and this is where the real opportunity lies—there's so much potential to accelerate discovery and fundamentally shift what humans spend their time doing.
We talk a lot about this at Hum when it comes to Alchemist Review. The goal is to free editors from the mechanical work, help them triage a massive amount of papers faster, and give them the time to do deeper, more expert, more relationship-driven work. We're hearing from editors who are relieved to have caught something that might have wound up as a retraction, saving them hours. We're starting to see editors have more time for developing relationships with authors and reviewers.
I'm hoping 2026 is the year we hear publishers talk more about the value of the time they're getting back and how they're reinvesting that human time in meaningful ways. Companies that are leveraging AI to unlock the most valuable parts of their human workforce are going to come out ahead of the companies that are just thinking of AI as a means to do the same amount of work with fewer people.
SAM: I'm curious to see what happens when we feel we're efficient enough. When we've optimized, what comes next?
We're excited about the contents of this report, both the contributions and the predictions that many have provided. We're also eager to hear your predictions. Download the 2026 Tech Trends Report and share your thoughts with us on what's next for scholarly publishing.