The Future of the Business Book Isn’t the Book

Networking, publishing, storytelling none of it looks the way it used to. As AI accelerates how ideas are produced and distributed, the traditional business book is no longer the center of gravity. It’s becoming something else entirely: a node in a much larger ecosystem.

A recent Financial Times article explores how authors are experimenting with format, technology, and audience engagement to rethink what a “book” even is. Among those featured is CEO and Founder Rimjhim Dey, who is quoted twice, offering a clear lens on how the mechanics of influence and idea-sharing have fundamentally shifted.

The full article originally appeared in the Financial Times.

Breaking cover: the future of the business book

When best-selling business author and marketer Seth Godin started working on his latest book, The Knot, he looked for new ways to engage his potential readers

He cloned his voice using AI, recorded his work in progress, sold the provisional audiobook to about 500 people, invited their questions about the draft and used their feedback to inform the next version. Other outlets for The Knot, which is about how to identify and solve problems, include an online course, which is already available, even though the book is not officially out until the autumn.

Godin compares himself to a stand-up comic, testing and refining his material as he works. “With a lot of the projects I’ve done recently I will put the work there, and then I watch what [readers] do. I don’t ask them what they think of the book, I watch what they do with it,” he told the FT.

Godin’s approach is just one example of the ways authors — and business authors, in particular — are playing with form and formats. As the FT and new partner Standard Chartered launch the 2026 Business Book of the Year Award, the genre is breaking out of its hard covers, embracing new technology, new platforms and new purchasing models to communicate authors’ ideas.

Interviewed after winning last year’s award for The Thinking Machine, his in-depth investigation of AI chipmaker Nvidia, Stephen Witt speculated that in future, his book might “respond to the reader . . . and then, on the fly, using AI, generate a unique bespoke text that speaks directly to their concerns”.

In the face of publisher scepticism and AI’s limitations, Witt now says he sees the “adaptable book” as a “longer-term technology project”.

That business books are at the cutting edge of rethinking the form is not a surprise. For many business authors, particularly coaches, consultants, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and academics, the book itself has always been only one way of catalysing discussion, spreading ideas or setting out a legacy. 

Andrew Grill’s book Digitally Curious, which appeared in 2024, is a guide to navigating AI. Produced and refined with the help of large language models, it also offered readers a customised ChatGPT AI chatbot — CuriousGPT — that they could prompt with questions about themes in the work. Business authors “naturally want to see the industry disrupted a bit”, says Grill. He thinks his next book could have a “choose your own adventure” audio version, guiding listeners to the part of the work they are most interested in. 

One disrupter exploring new ways of working with authors is former US chief executive of Penguin Random House, Madeline McIntosh, who co-founded Authors Equity, publisher of Godin’s The Knot. “Business book authors tend to think of the book as something that goes beyond the bounds of this little rectangular package,” she says. “They think in terms of a set of ideas that they’re packaging now: sometimes that’s a book, sometimes a lecture, sometimes a podcast.”

The pace of experimentation is picking up. Rimjhim Dey, whose US-based marketing agency Dey Ideas + Influence acts for a number of business thinkers, says she has seen “the whole ecosystem shift on how you get your messages out”. She points out that when Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook chief operating officer, wrote Lean In in 2013, she created a community of women to discuss the hurdles they faced at work. “The book was an instrument for creating these communities,” she says. “That’s no longer the case. You can grow communities in other ways.”

Generative AI is both the most potent, and, for publishers and authors, the most divisive of the technological tools and media now capable of spreading business ideas. Suspicion of the technology runs deep, mainly because of the industry’s continuing dispute with many developers of large language models, which they accuse of having built their powerful bots on material scraped from copyrighted books.

Even so, at last month’s London Book Fair, traditional publishers sat alongside an array of AI-fuelled publishing ventures, including ElevenLabs, the AI audio company that generated a synthetic version of Godin’s voice, and Write Business Results, which was promoting an AI “companion” that helps authors plan and draft business books. The latter’s founder, Georgia Kirke, who helped Grill bring his book to the shelves, says the business book is often just one avenue for authors to promote “brand awareness and increase revenue”.

Publishers are already using AI to improve efficiency, speed up production and even brainstorm title and cover ideas. Kirke is also piloting products to help publishers assess the potential of manuscripts, to which they can then apply their human editing skills.

But, asked on one book fair panel about how technology might change the form of the book itself, independent publisher Keith Riegert of The Stable Book Group, pushed back. He is seeing “a big resurgence of people wanting to get away from their screens. So I don’t think there’s going to be much change in what a book is . . . We have seen over and over again weird innovations in books fail.” These have included, in the 1990s, CD-ROMs, read-only compact discs loaded with additional information that were sometimes bundled with reference books, and more recently, ebooks “enhanced” with interactive elements.

One reason these have not caught on is that their interactive features were initially clunky and interrupted the flow for readers. But publishers have for years fiddled with the form of the business book, peppering would-be bestsellers with modules, bullet points, breakout panels and other devices to help busy readers quickly absorb their authors’ ideas.

Even innovators, though, think there are risks in deconstructing the book altogether. “The printed text is the source of truth and the version I would give you would be a derivation of that or maybe a truncation of that,” suggests Grill. He concedes he would have to put guardrails in place to prevent an AI version going rogue by, say, extrapolating on his ideas in unwanted or even offensive ways.

Talia Krohn, former vice-president and editorial director at publisher Little, Brown Spark, worries more about AI algorithms leaching the human element out of business books. Business titles have for years coexisted with services offering summarised versions as well as online courses and podcasts. But, Krohn says, “people want to hear what the specific person is saying. They don’t just want algorithmic advice. More than ever, the personality behind the advice matters and the AI can never be a trusted personality that readers want to hear from.”

A common refrain is that the industry is averse to taking risks. But McIntosh points out that publishers did innovate with CD-ROMs and enhanced ebooks, and, while they “get painted as dinosaurs, they aren’t: they are pragmatists [asking] ‘how much money will this cost to do and how much money will we make?’” What is more, Dey adds, in a market where everyone can publish their ideas somewhere, editors offer valuable quality control. Entrenched publishing processes are a more likely obstacle to change, according to Krohn.

That said, the business book is unlikely to stand still. The book is “mostly an excuse to have a discussion; it isn’t the best binder for the information”, says Godin. “It’s changing way more than my peers want to admit. I’m dancing with it, I’m finding it thrilling. I’m not trying to defend what came before . . . I’m trying to figure out what’s coming next.”