ai@media international

Welcome, agenda, and communication rules

Erin L. Cox is the Publisher of Publishing Perspectives. She has spent more than 25 years on the business development and promotional side of the publishing industry, working in book publicity at Scribner and HarperCollins, advertising sales and marketing at The New Yorker, and consulting with publishers, literary organizations, book fairs, writers, and technology companies serving the publishing industry. Cox is also the Publisher of Words & Money, a new media site focused on centering libraries in the publishing conversation.

Darryll Colthrust
Darryll Colthrust is the incoming Chief Technology Officer at Macmillan Publishers, where he will lead enterprise technology strategy, AI integration, and data transformation across the organization. He brings more than 20 years of experience driving digital transformation across publishing, finance, retail, and other sectors. As Co-Founder and Co-CEO of CHAPTR and AI Board Advisor to Holtzbrinck, he has worked extensively at the intersection of technology, innovation, and growth — helping organizations modernize systems and responsibly deploy emerging technologies while maintaining a human-centered approach. His perspective bridges strategic leadership and hands-on technology expertise, with a clear focus on using innovation to support authors, deepen reader engagement, and amplify human creativity rather than replace it.

In conversation with Erin Cox, Javier Celaya examines how AI is reshaping audio publishing – from production workflows and multilingual scaling to marketing automation, licensing, and new business models.
This session cuts through the hype to address practical decisions: Which tools deliver real value? Where does human expertise remain critical? How do you build sustainable licensing frameworks? And what does it take to turn audio into new business opportunities?

Javier Celaya is Founding Partner of Dosdoce.com, where he has spent over 20 years helping creative and cultural organizations navigate digital transformation. He currently serves as Chairman of Aniara.One, a Swedish start-up revolutionizing publishing through AI-driven translation and production across multiple languages. With extensive experience advising leading digital platforms including Bookwire, Storytel, and Podimo on their international expansion strategies, Javier brings deep expertise in Spanish-language markets spanning Spain and Latin America. He maintains a broad portfolio as strategic advisor to publishers, streaming platforms, and media conglomerates, and has taught at institutions including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute and multiple Spanish universities.

Soon the majority of content consumption will be mediated by AI systems, not human readers. This fundamentally breaks the business models publishers depend on — ads, subscriptions, and pageviews all assume a human on the other end. So who pays when the reader is a machine?

In this session, Giacomo and Titusz introduce Amlet, the platform that helps publishers prepare for this shift. We’ll show how to register your catalog with content-based digital fingerprints (ISCC), declare machine-readable AI usage rights that comply with the EU AI Act, and make your works discoverable to the AI systems that are already looking for licensed content. We’ll walk through the live product and demonstrate how the gap between what TDM regulations demand and what publishers can do today is finally closing. Your content has value in the AI economy – it’s time to claim it.

Giacomo D’Angelo, Amlet CEO and co-founder
CEO of StreetLib, a global digital publishing platform serving 600K+ titles. Proven track record in scaling publishing technology. 15+ years in digital publishing.

Titusz Pan, Amlet CTO and co-founder
Inventor of the ISCC content identification standard (ISO 24138:2024). Technical visionary with deep understanding of content infrastructure. 25+ years in digital media technology.

In this round-table panel, Emma House speaks with leading experts who are shaping the AI transformation in publishing. They share their experiences with AI implementation, discuss strategic challenges of AI integration, and demonstrate how diverse perspectives drive innovation in publishing – especially in a tech field that remains male-dominated.

Emma House – International Publishing Consultant
Emma House is an international publishing consultant specialising in event curation and management, research and reports, international business development and mentorship.​ Emma’s career spans 26 years including 6 years in magazine publishing and 20 years in the book and journal publishing sector. She was Head of International Development at the London Book Fair and Deputy CEO at the Publishers Association until 2019 before setting up her own publishing consultancy – Oreham Group. Emma project manages an adult literacy initiative called Quick Reads, run by the Reading Agency, and is chair of the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI). She is a trustee of the Publishing Training Centre, a board member of the advisory group for Oxford Brookes University Centre for Publishing Studies and a former board member of the PublisHer network founded by Bodour Al Qasimi.

Arantza Larrauri
Arantza Larrauri holds a degree in Business Administration from ESADE, where she also earned an MBA, and a Master in International Management (MIM) from Thunderbird School of Global Management (Arizona, USA). More recently, she completed a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence at Tech University, specializing in educational applications. With over two decades of experience in the book industry, she has worked at Círculo de Lectores and Random House. In 2010, she was appointed General Manager of Libranda, and since its integration into the Canadian company De Marque in 2018, she has been Market Director for Europe and Latin America.
She combines her professional role with teaching at the UOC Master in Publishing and Artificial Intelligence training programs for book professionals at the PARIX school. She also contributes regularly to specialized media and is the author of poetry collections and short stories.

Meru Gokhale
Meru Gokhale is a publishing professional with over twenty-two years of experience in the literary world. As former Publisher of The Penguin Press Group in India, she worked with authors including Nobel laureates, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, and winners of the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize. She is the founder and CEO of Editrix.ai, the world’s most powerful professional book editing platform.

Brooke Dobson
Brooke Dobson is Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Shimmr AI, the first fully automated advertising platform built specifically for books. With expertise in economic forecasting, marketing analytics, and AI technologies, she brings a practitioner’s perspective on how AI can transform publishing. As a non-technical leader responsible for Revenue and Operations, Brooke has built AI agents to systematically analyze campaign performance, validate financial data, and generate executive-ready insights — demonstrating how accessible AI tools enable teams to move from ad-hoc prompting to repeatable, trustworthy systems. Her executive background spans AI-native SaaS businesses (COO, CSO, US President), and at Shimmr, she translates cutting-edge AI into practical, revenue-generating strategies for publishers. Her perspective is valuable for an industry seeking to unlock new audiences, scale discoverability, and make faster, data-informed decisions.

How are publishers moving from the first wave of AI experiments to more sustained integration? What tools are they using and how are they preparing for future developments?

In this session, Hannah Johnson, Chief Customer Officer at Veristage, will share a brief overview of Veristage and its Insight AI platform for publishers, then host a conversation with Seid Serdarević, publisher at the acclaimed Croatian house Fraktura, about what’s actually working in their AI workflows today—and what they’re experimenting with next.

The discussion will cover real examples of how Fraktura uses Insight alongside other AI tools, successes and challenges, and future-oriented experiments. This session is designed for publishers who want to understand how AI is being used today and where it’s heading.

Hannah Johnson (Chief Customer Officer, Veristage)
As Chief Customer Officer at Veristage, Hannah helps publishers effectively work with Veristage’s AI tools and integrate this evolving technology into their operations. She previously served as publisher of Publishing Perspectives, a leading international book trade magazine, and worked with the Frankfurt Book Fair to manage partnerships and event initiatives with publishing organizations worldwide.

Seid Serdarević was born in 1970. He completed his education in Zagreb, graduating with degrees in comparative literature and Bohemian studies. Since his student days, he has launched magazines, edited newspapers, and books. In 2002, he and his wife Sibila founded the publishing house Fraktura, where he is still the editor-in-chief. the publishing house Fraktura, where he is still the editor-in-chief. He has edited more than six hundred books and selected over a thousand for publication. The books he has edited have won all the major Croatian and international awards. He founded the Festival of World Literature, for which he is the program director. He has been the producer of several theatrical plays. He was the recipient of the Mirko Kovač Scholarship for the prestigious Herder Prize, won the Kiklop Award for Best Editor in 2007, and in 2015, Fraktura was named the best publishing house in the world by the London Book Fair. He is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic and a Cross of Queen Elizabeth the Catholic of the Kingdom of Spain.

Metadata is no longer just a back-office task; it’s a commercial tool that drives discoverability, sales, and reader engagement. Sarah Arbuthnot explores how AI can be used to transform metadata into a dynamic asset that can be optimised in real time. Improving visibility across retail, search, social, and AI-driven discovery platforms. It covers key opportunities for publishers and practical recommendations for ensuring high-impact metadata,  especially for smaller teams with limited resources.

Sarah Arbuthnot is President of Supadu, a leading metadata-driven website and eCommerce platform serving more than 300 publishers worldwide. With a background in digital strategy and global eCommerce for major brands, she now works closely with publishers to drive direct-to-consumer growth, strengthen digital presence, and ensure books in any format are accessible to readers everywhere. A senior leader at the intersection of publishing and technology, Sarah is a regular speaker on the practical and strategic challenges facing publishers today, with a particular focus on data, metadata, eCommerce, and building sustainable, reader-centric digital platforms.

As AI companies work to push their products into creative industries, two provocative questions emerge for the publishing industry: What do AI companies want from writers and publishers — and what can writers, readers, and publishers gain from AI companies and their products?

A thought-provoking conversation at how AI companies are challenging longstanding norms about the meaning and value of language and what that means for literature.

Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age andThe Immortal King Rao explores this evolution in writing and reading. Drawing on her experience as both novelist and journalist covering technology, she examines what AI-generated fiction means for authors, publishers, and the future of storytelling. Can human creativity coexist with machine-generated narratives? And if readers can’t tell the difference—or don’t care—what does that reveal about how we value literary art?

AI tools have the potential to impact many facets of the audiobook industry, but not all AI tools are intended to replace human creativity. This presentation by Pozotron CEO Adam Fritz will include an overview of AI’s potential impact on the scripted audio industry, and will include a demonstration of how Pozotron Studio makes human voiced audio content easier to make, more accurate, and more profitable.

Adam Fritz is the CEO Pozotron, Inc. and has been with the company since 2021. Adam has a BA and MBA, and prior to Pozotron had executive and leadership roles with multiple companies in the software and professional sport industries. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with his two sons who listen to audiobooks 24/7.

Pozotron Studio is an AI-powered software suite designed to save hours in the audiobook, voiceover, and scripted audio production process. Pozotron’s tools significantly reduce production stresses and costs while increasing audio quality at the same time. Using state-of-the-art technology, Pozotron focuses on boosting efficiency and accuracy for professionals in scripted audio production—not replacing them with automation. To learn more and access your free trial, visit pozotron.com today!

Blanca and Christian will present how German publisher Wort & Bild (known for the health magazine Apotheken Umschau) implemented an AI-powered, source-grounded Q&A search on apotheken-umschau.de—moving from classic keyword search to natural-language questions that return fast answers backed by editorially checked content. The case illustrates how AI can improve content discoverability, reader engagement, and retention without sacrificing editorial control—absolutely essential in areas like healthcare and medical information. It also shows how AI can help publishers surface and monetize evergreen journalism at scale while reducing reliance on external platforms for discovery.

Blanca Ramos Elbal is a consultant at ONTEC AI. She analyzes customer use cases and develops tailored AI deployments that perfectly match the specific requirements of each company. With a background as a data scientist, she brings extensive experience as a Project Assistant in the research industry.

As Head of Partnerships & Sales at ONTEC AI, Christian Casari advises companies that want to support their business-critical processes with AI technology. His focus is particularly on making companies‘ unstructured data treasures usable. Through accompanying the implementation of various AI projects and numerous conversations with customers, he has solid experience with the successful use of AI in companies.

Roundup & Goodbye