In early May, CCC hosted “Workflow of the Future: Sustainable Business Models,” the latest event in a series designed to help facilitate important conversations on critical topics related to standards. This event focused on standards publishers and how they are responding to the needs of their stakeholders in an increasingly digital and connected world. You can read a summary of the event here.
This post is the first in a series of opinion pieces picking up on the themes and topics discussed in the webinar, with a particular focus on the current and potential impacts of technology trends – in this case genAI – on the standards ecosystem. Today, I will focus on the perspective of the standards publisher.
In the webinar – a mere four months ago (although it feels much longer) – I described the rate of announcements around genAI as like observing a ‘tsunami’ coming towards the shore. Since then, the pace of change has remained relentless, although it takes more exceptional items to break through the news cycle. I’d argue that the AI wave is still coming in, and various parts of the content landscape are underwater. It remains to be seen whether this AI wave is solely destructive, or if it also stimulates new growth in the standards ecosystem.
Examples of the pace of change are so numerous that I have had to rewrite this section several times. There have been increasing calls for regulation, including various preliminary legislative hearings across the globe; countless product and API releases; several AI-focused standards industry events; and inevitably a number of class action lawsuit filings over how the LLMs gather information. Regardless, the innovation curve is still accelerating as more and more organizations look to adopt genAI to either reduce costs or in the quest for new forms of value.
During the webinar, Silona Bonewald claimed ‘the biggest competitor’ she fears is ‘time’. I’d reframe this slightly, as inertia. To many observers, this author included, the industry is almost pathologically averse to change. And the main change that is required is a change of mindset.
Industry initiatives like shared schemas, ontologies, or identifiers – even SMART – all of which are looking to grow the world of standards usage, tend to have a frustratingly small number of active participants. We should be working together to meet users’ needs through digital means – and by ‘work’ I mean code, infrastructure, interfaces, schemas, talent. And we should embrace the FAIR principle for ‘As open as possible, as closed as necessary’. The world is increasingly connected, and our customers depend on us working together – and we need to be in that world. Not a closed world based on how the world was 20+ years ago.
With notable exceptions, one of the specific challenges for standards publishers is that their customers may not use, let alone derive value from, their product for months, if not years after purchase. There is very limited feedback available from which to make decisions. And in the absence of data, we have inertia.
I’m not saying we all need to deploy chatbots or abandon the core principles of value through wisdom that most standards publishers uphold. But I am saying that if we don’t do more to acknowledge the world around us, then as Silona also said, ‘we’re already dying’. Just as a generation of publishers were taught to mimic Amazon if we wanted to be successful in ecommerce, we would need to at least approximate ChatGPT levels of empathy and simplicity if we expect to survive in the future.