Taylor & Francis set to make £58m from AI in 2024 as it reveals second partnership

The parent company of academic publisher Taylor & Francis has revealed it expects to earn £58m ($75m) from Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnerships in 2024 and that it has a second AI technology partnership agreement already in place in addition to Microsoft.

In its half-year financial results, Informa—a FTSE 100 international B2B Events, B2B Digital Services and Academic Markets group—said Taylor & Francis had seen 7.5% of "underlying" revenue growth in the first six months of this financial year having been "boosted by AI partnership revenues".

Last week, The Bookseller reported that some academics published by Taylor & Francis (with its portfolio of specialist publishing brands Routledge, CRC Press and F1000) were "shocked" to discover the publisher had sold rights to its book data to Microsoft AI for an initial £8m ($10m).

Informa’s financial results confirm the business has at least one further AI partnership agreement in place in addition to Microsoft and is expecting the "addition of further AI partnerships" later this financial year. 

In results published to the Stock Exchange, the business said it plans to reinvest a third of its AI-related profit into "accelerated technology, open research and AI product development... based on our unique content".

Informa’s statement said: "Across the group, we are deploying AI technology to drive operating efficiencies and enhance our products and services. Within academic markets, this includes deployment in areas such as research paper submissions, authenticity screening, factual verification and editorial."

It added: "We are also now partnering with two leading AI technology companies on the role of specialist expert agents, exploring the potential to develop new products that help to further promote discovery, research understanding, research integrity and knowledge creation."

These partnerships include data access agreements Taylor & Francis archive content "to help train and improve the relevance of outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs)".

It described these as "a source of significant new value for Taylor & Francis and additional royalties for authors, with total AI partnership revenues expected to be over $75m in 2024".

Academic authors published by Taylor & Francis claimed last week that they had not been told about the AI deal, hadn’t been given an opt-out and were not receiving any further royalties or other remuneration for using their published work by AI technology. 

Last week, Taylor & Francis confirmed it it providing Microsoft non-exclusive access "to advanced learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems" but that "it protects intellectual property rights, including protecting the integrity of our authors’ work and limits on verbatim text reproduction, as well as authors’ rights to receive royalty payments in accordance with their author contracts".

Informa initially announced the partnership with Microsoft AI during a trading update in May. Taylor & Francis’ revenue for the six months of this financial year was £301m. Overall, Informa’s revenue was up 11.5% to £1.69bn, with an operating profit of £467m. Informa has adjusted its profit forecast for 2024 upwards and now expects it to be more than £1bn. 

Chief executive, Stephen A. Carter, said: "As the world digitises at pace, our brands, our content and our market positions are becoming more valuable. This is moving Informa into a faster growth lane for performance, expansion and returns, as demonstrated by our full year target of up to £1bn of adjusted operating profit."

When contacted by The Bookseller, a spokesman for Taylor & Francis declined to name the second AI technology provider it is already in partnership with.