AI Publisher Response Agenda
To learn more about the event, how to request your invitation, sponsorships, and more, please visit the AI Publisher Response page.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
| Session Title | Session Description |
|---|---|
| Morning Keynote: It’s Time Publisher’s Take Action | Publishers are being picked off one by one—negotiating individually, adopting vendor solutions in isolation, and losing leverage in the process. This session makes the case for coordinated response, shared frameworks, and using collective voice to shape AI’s role in publishing rather than being shaped by it. |
| BREAKOUTS (FIRST ROUND) | |
| Creating Content-Focused Marketplaces | Models are being developed so that publishers get paid for their content and IP. |
| Creating Content Without Losing Your Soul | Let’s discuss how to continue to produce content that takes time, expertise and money to create that now competes with content that takes no time, expertise or cost to produce. |
| Publishing Needs to Operate More Efficiently, Now! | This isn’t an ops discussion, it’s a business operations discussion. How do we start to rethink what the publisher business model is considering the world we now occupy? |
| Advertising is a Relationship-Driven Endeavor | So why aren’t the buy side and sell side working closer together? |
| Publishers Must Think More Like Consumer Brands | People will not discover publisher content if they don’t know we exist or are given a better product by someone else. Other brands have these issues: what can we learn from them? |
| BREAKOUTS (SECOND ROUND) | |
| Rewiring Advertising From Top to Bottom | Every supposedly new innovation in advertising brings with it the baggage of how advertising has long been bought and sold. What if we could rethink it and what if that could benefit publishers? |
| Ad Ops Is a Good Place to Start | Your advertising operations department- both programmatic and direct sold – is a good place to start to find new efficiencies and create new opportunities. Your problem solvers are ready to work the problem. |
| Creating Real Community at Scale | Publishers much come much closer to their consumers to survive, and yet how does one create community at a scale that makes business sense? |
| Is AEO just answering people’s questions? | Are we moving to a world where our content answers people’s questions or feed the algorithms or both? Does AI actually free publishers to focus more on what people want? |
| Revenue Predictability in an Unpredictable Marketplace | Publishers can’t invest or grow if they think too much in the short term, but it’s hard to build a business when things are too volatile. Let’s find a way to navigate these waters. |
| LUNCH | |
| Afternoon Keynote: The True Cost of Not Valuing Journalism | Journalists are jailed and sometimes killed while pursuing a story. What happens when we don’t have someone on the front lines to tell the story? |
| BREAKOUTS (THIRD ROUND) | |
| Coming to the Negotiating Table Together | Who is creating opportunities for publishers to collaborate when making deals with the LLMs? |
| Trust in Human-Created Content | Trusting what we are seeing in the digital world will only become more difficult. How is this an opportunity for publishers to become the source people seek out? |
| What does “Scale” Mean in the Future? | Big Tech is only getting Bigger, so why do we try to keep up? How can we use our lack of scale to our advantage? |
| What Part Does First-Party Data Play Going Forward? | First-party data has long been described as the gold publishers are sitting on. Does this new world provide opportunity to see returns or have the mineral rights to that gold been stolen from underneath our feet? |
| Scraping Isn’t Just for LLMs anymore | Consumers and companies aren’t just looking to the large LLMs to collect the information they need. New tools means new interactions with our content. Opportunity or another way our work will be undervalued? |
| BREAKOUTS (FOURTH ROUND) | |
| Can We Actually Collaborate with Long-Term Vision? | Everyone shakes their head in the affirmative when it comes to publishers working together… except it doesn’t happen. We look to organizations to bring us together, but don’t show up and participate. When will we decide that collective action is the only way we all survive? |
| The Influence of Influencers | People like other people more than they do brands. So why aren’t enough publishers leading with their people and adapting to the influencer-lead content trends? |
| Investing in Our #1 Resource: People | Automate all you want, but publishing is one of the best examples where a “human in the loop” will be a differentiator. So why are we investing more in tools than people? |
| Does AI Bring Brands and Publishers Together? | Brands and publishers both need to connect with humans. Is this the thread that leads us to start working more closely together? |
| Is It on Us to Teach Media Literacy? | People will flock to “good enough” content. How do we get people to understand that isn’t the best way to understand the world they live in? |
| Closing Keynote: Will This Event Exist Next Year? | If our goal is to rally publishers to take control of their destinies, will enough forward progress happen between now and next year for the conversations to continue? |