Keith Riegert, president of the Stable Book Group, offered a master class on AI tools during the recent Sharjah Publishers Conference. He is pushing his 20-person team to integrate artificial intelligence across all operations, calling the technology's rapid advancement "the biggest change" he's witnessed in two decades in the industry. He described AI as both transformative and unsettling, acknowledging he's "not very happy that AI is here," but insists publishers have no choice but to adapt. "It's time to use it or get left behind," he said.
Riegert's company, which brings together a number of different indie publishers, implemented a business-wide OpenAI license costing roughly $600 monthly. The investment pays for itself within days through productivity gains, Riegert claimed, and he mandates employees use AI at least an hour daily.
His guidance about AI was straightforward: "Treat AI like it's a very intelligent but inexperienced assistant." The goal is to automate menial tasks and free staff for creative work, though Riegert acknowledged a trade-off. Junior editors who once spent two weeks drafting sales conference scripts now complete them in 30 minutes using custom GPT tools trained on five years of company scripts—but, he admitted, “they don’t exercise that muscle and miss out on the opportunity to build that skill for themselves.”
The urgency to gain a better understanding of how AI works stems from the technology's evolution from a stand-alone tool to autonomous agent capable of making decisions independently. Riegert demonstrated a five-agent workforce that produced a complete book—research, writing, layout, cover design, and Amazon metadata—in five minutes from a single prompt. The result was "terrible," he admitted, but functional enough to list on Kindle Direct Publishing before he deleted it. That capability signals a flood of AI-generated content already plaguing the industry. "As soon as Kara Swisher's biography was announced, there were half a dozen AI-generated clones that came to market well before publication," Riegert said, describing the subsequent takedown efforts as "whack-a-mole."
Stable Publishing has built custom applications for specific pain points: a contract-trained paralegal GPT, an Amazon A-Plus content generator to adapt to Amazon's shift from keyword-based A9 search algorithms to AI-powered A10, and a chatbot developed using Intercom.ai that eliminated 12 daily customer service requests.
Riegert also pointed to Google's Notebook LM, which generates two-person podcasts from manuscripts in minutes, as valuable for rights materials and book trailers. Despite enthusiasm for productivity gains, Riegert expressed deep ambivalence about AI's trajectory. He showed a graph tracking the S&P 500 against U.S. job openings—metrics that moved in lockstep for 20 years until AI's emergence caused them to diverge sharply. "Tech layoffs have definitely begun," he noted. "Ironically, this is hitting tech first. The same people who built the AI are now getting displaced by it."
Looking ahead, Riegert outlined two scenarios: exponential AI growth leading to humanoid robots and mass unemployment, or a scaling plateau triggering economic collapse. "This is the version of the future that I would prefer," he said of the latter, "but I don't know which one's going to happen."
You can find the full presentation deck online.
