A trio of women building AI-driven publishing companies are moving past the question of whether to adopt the technology and instead using it to redesign how their businesses operate entirely.

On a panel discussion at the held at the virtual ai@media conference March 24, Brooke Dobson of Shimmer.ai, Arantza Larrauri of DeMarque, and Meru Ghokhale of Editrix.ai described AI deployments that have gone well beyond drafting or summarizing text, touching marketing automation, financial modeling, accessibility compliance, and book editing.

The panel focused on practical applications of AI on the technology’s potential application to closegender gaps in publishing's technical and leadership ranks.

"The whole system self-optimizes and self-learns," Dobson said of Shimmer's autonomous marketing platform, which she described as a team of AI agents that analyzes a book's content, comparable titles, and cultural context to develop advertising strategies and deploy campaigns independently.

Internally, Dobson said, she uses AI to monitor campaign performance across thousands of titles, build financial models, and pressure-test business strategy. "This has really helped me to move from the doing and managing parts of my work to really orchestrating systems that help me make higher quality decisions," she noted.

Ghokhale said Editrix.ai has reached a point where AI handles 95% to 97% of mechanical editing—tasks like comma placement and em-dash consistency—freeing editors to focus on judgment and craft. She said Editrix has also built a specialized agentic tool for editing books translated from German to English, which checks the edited manuscript against the German original to ensure fidelity.

Meanwhile, DeMarque’s Larrauri said the company asks one question before employing AI: Will it advance the company's mission of expanding accessible digital reading? The most significant application, she noted, has been accessibility compliance.

"AI helps more in accessibility because it can do so many things that allow people who couldn't read, or have difficulties reading, to access content," Larrauri said.

DeMarque's platform Cantook Access gives publishers tools to generate alt text for images, tag foreign-language content, and create synthetic audio using artificial voices. The company also uses AI to suggest BISAC categories during distribution and to optimize pricing.

Larrauri said transparency is central to how DeMarque uses AI, and it discloses which models it uses and gives library clients the ability to opt in or out of AI-powered recommendation features.

Dobson said that on the whole, publishers have moved from asking whether to use AI to asking how to use it for competitive advantage. She noted that one publisher recently told her that younger employees seemed more resistant to AI than older ones, an observation which with her fellow panelists concurred.

The solution, Dobson said, to getting younger employees interested is to create a “sandbox environment” in which an employee can play and experiment with the tech. "One-off uses of ChatGPT is not where the unlock happens," she noted. "The real economic impact comes from systematically optimizing certain workflows."

Ghokhale predicted that geopolitical pressures, such as rising freight costs, tariffs, and thin margins, to accelerate AI adoption. "I think we will see publishers starting to acknowledge they can use AI to protect their margins and protect their businesses," she said.

But Larrauri, who has taught AI courses through Spain's Parix book industry training program, believes that shift in attitude has already taken hold, noting that 1,800 students have enrolled in the three AI courses the program offers.

All three panelists also said the technology has the potential to dissolve barriers that have historically limited women’s ability to advance in publishing. Ghokhale, who came up through editorial, said traditional publishing kept creative and commercial roles siloed in ways that often constrained women. She described AI as "a great leveler" and an opportunity for women to "get out of that very traditional way of seeing" publishing roles.

Dobson concurred. "AI really levels the playing field because you really don't need to be a trained engineer," she said. "You just need to get in there and start doing the work."