Y.S. Chi, chairman of Elsevier and director of RELX, doesn’t mince words when it comes to discussing the future of publishing. "No publisher will survive five years from today if they don't have data," he said last week at the 15th Sharjah Publishers Conference. "I don't care how well you edit and publish books. If you don't have data, you will make wrong decisions."
Chi, who also serves on the Sharjah Book Authority board and was recently honored with a lifetime achievement award by the International Publishers Association, led a workshop on "Leadership in Time of Change" that tackled the publishing industry's most fundamental challenges: how to transform internal operations, compete in rapidly evolving markets, and survive technological disruption.
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At the top of his agenda was addressing perhaps the most urgent threat to publishing: artificial intelligence. "You can't do AI unless you have data," Chi explained. "You cannot just go in and use large language models and ask a question to get an answer, because it's not your answer—it's the answer of all the other people. You have to put in your data to get your answer." Without proprietary data, he said, "AI is just an encyclopedia. It's not a source of answers for your business. It's better than nothing, but it's not as good as having your own data."
Chi revealed that Elsevier began building its data infrastructure 16 years ago through an unconventional strategy. "I hired quietly, not telling anybody, three 22-year-olds straight out of university—computer science majors with no publishing experience," he said. "I said, quietly, go find every bit of data you can from inside the company, then go out and find all the data you wish we had but we don't have. That's how we started to accumulate things. Today, we have many thousands of sources of data coming in naturally. We don't throw anything away."
The scope of data collection that Chi advocates for extends far beyond sales figures. He explained how, among Elsevier’s various entities, is a company that collects data on the aviation industry, particularly on every airplane ever manufactured throughout history. "If you don't have the data, you can't make decisions," he said, drawing the parallel to publishing. "We as leaders of the organization have to be truly, truly, truly obsessed about the amount and the quality of the data we collect."
Chi emphasized that data must cover the entire publishing value chain. "From finding a title to translate, the editing process, manufacturing process, the selling process—all of these processes, you've got to capture data," he said. He emphasized that all digital activity should automatically be captured as data. "Everything today is born digital. We don't use paper to do things anymore," he noted, pointing out that even typesetting creates digital records.
But he acknowledged data acquisition extends beyond internal operations. "Some data is ours, some is shared. Sometimes we have to barter and exchange. Sometimes I have to buy. Sometimes I sell. If you say, 'Well, I don't want to pay for it,' then you will have partial data. It's better than no data, but it's not as good as full data. So you have to be ready to do these data exchanges."
Bringing in outside talent
Chi's approach to managing transformation is to seek out talent from other industries. "As we look at the last 100 people we hired, only 10% came from inside the industry," he said. "Ninety percent came from outside. They came from food, fashion, airlines—it doesn't matter if they have expertise."
This cross-industry recruitment strategy stems from necessity, not experimentation. "In the last six months, my company needed eight new technology skills that we didn't even know existed six months ago," Chi explained. "Six months ago, we had all these headcounts and talents we planned out. And then today, it's like, I didn't know this existed because it's all new technology."
The publishing industry's traditional insularity, Chi argued, represents a fatal weakness. "We think that the only talent we can get is from inside the publishing industry. That is a very big mistake. You have to be willing to get talented people even if they have never done anything with the publishing industry."
He illustrated this principle through a striking example: the CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions is Dean Curtis, a former professional soccer player. "Why? Because he has amazing leadership. He knows how to make an organization move and win." Chi said. "We needed that kind of leadership because we were kind of winning, kind of not winning, and it was not clear. And he wanted it clear: win or lose. So he's changed the culture of the company using his sports experience."
The longer a company exists, Chi argued, the more it needs external perspectives. At Elsevier, "if you thought that we could only get people who know publishing to work at our company, we would be dead."
Beyond hiring, Chi advocated aggressive outsourcing and working with allies, particularly for smaller publishers. "You have to find alliances. You can't do everything by yourself," he said.
This includes finding talent outside home markets. "You have to ask at that point, who am I competing against? If you're competing against the rest of the world, you have to find the talent to compete for the world. If you're just competing for your territory, you run the risk, eventually, that somebody from outside will enter your market," Chi said. "It's not a short-term problem. It's a more medium-to-long-term problem.”
Lacking a killer instinct
Chi's most pointed criticism targeted publishing's cultural relationship with success. "One of the things I worry about publishing—and you may know I was president of the International Publishers Association, so I worry about all publishers everywhere in the world—is that many of us are in publishing without clearly wanting to win," he said. "We're in it because we love it. And if we can get 50 people to read it, it's okay. Well, to me, it's not okay. We've got to set higher goals, because otherwise movies will kill us, the internet will kill us, TikTok will kill us. Anybody can threaten us unless we want to win."
Szilvia Kuczogi, Publishing Director of Europa Könyvkiadó in Hungary, who came to publishing after serving as deputy editor of Budapest’s leading daily newspaper, highlighted a key structural difference. "The challenges in publishing are strange because you can see the consequences of your decisions much later," she noted. "So if you are winning, you don't know now. And when you win, you don't know which was your right decision."
Chi acknowledged the delayed feedback loop but argued other industries face similar challenges while maintaining competitive intensity. "In the fashion industry, they know two years before what the color will be. But they also have to wait a long time to see if it is successful. Still, they have stronger win-lose mentality than we do," he said. Even sports teams making long-term investments in young players face extended timelines before results materialize.
The unique pressure on publishing leaders, Chi explained, is balancing timeframes. "We don't have the luxury when the world is moving so fast around us to only take long-term decisions. We have to take short-term decisions and long-term decisions at the same time," he said. "You hope that the short-term decisions will keep buying you time so the long-term decision has a chance to survive."
He used farming as a metaphor: "You have to have a crop that turns every few weeks and pay for the trees that take years before you can harvest."
Chi's closing emphasis returned to organizational culture. Leaders must be "truly, truly, truly obsessed" about data quality and quantity, he repeated. The alternative, in Chi's assessment, is extinction within five years—not as hyperbole, but as market reality for an industry facing technological disruption, changing consumer behavior, and competition from entertainment platforms that have already built the data infrastructure publishing is only beginning to contemplate.
