This article first appeared in the Publishers Weekly Frankfurt Show Daily on October 16, 2019.

Publishers have looked on as machine learning technology has developed—but now it’s time to leap.

Over the course of the last five years, AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) have been much talked about, as well as trialed and tested, in the publishing industry. These technologies are often the focus of panel discussions at conferences such as this one, discussions that have illustrated how AI could be used for a variety of purposes: discovery, peer review, bestseller predictions, and, perhaps most importantly, improving publisher efficiency.