“We’ll use the AI Lab to transparently test and pilot potential AI solutions with our clients. Silverchair has always been committed to community feedback and collaboration, and our AI strategies are no different: we will learn from what works, what doesn’t work, and what gaps in the research lifecycle we might make more efficient using AI.”In that spirit of transparency and continuous learning, we’re sharing our reflections on how the AI Lab has evolved in the six months since its launch.
At launch, we were excited to share three concrete prototypes with Silverchair publishers. These features were designed to help us explore the most effective applications of AI for scholarly publishing platforms and how the potential of AI could be harnessed to transform how users discover and interact with high-value content. In the following months, we engaged with our clients as they explored the tools, learning what additional filters, safeguards, or functionality tweaks would be required to satisfy both user and publisher needs.
In these exchanges, our publishers, too, began to “get their hands dirty” in experimenting with AI use cases and possible business models. This led to the launch of the AI Playground, where our clients could compare different AI models, see costs for various functions, and see RAG solutions in action on scholarly content. The Playground itself has continued to evolve—our team has been adding new models as they’ve been released, fine-tuning settings, and updating functionality based on client feedback (as collected during regular meetings, in-tool feedback mechanisms, and during a series of all-client “Recess” working sessions).
As a result of what we learned in the Playground, our teams are now deeply involved with many of our clients to pursue projects on their own specific use cases, building solutions collaboratively to serve their users, while working closely with the Silverchair Product team to ensure that this AI development will also be fed back into the core platform for the benefit of all publishers who partner with Silverchair.
“As a home for experimentation, the AI Lab was always designed to evolve alongside our own understanding and our clients’ needs,” said Leitch, “We intentionally started with a broad perspective, trying out a variety of potential applications of AI to see what value we could derive. Using those learnings, we’ve now narrowed in on a core set of technologies that will be most transformative in our space. As we become more disciplined in terms of what we pursue, our end goal is not to be first to market with a shiny but ultimately faulty or lackluster offering, but to get to production with a robust system while performing more experimentation in the margins.”
In recent months, our teams have joined numerous industry panels and discussions on AI, sharing what we’ve learned, and have hosted three free webinars in our AI Lab Reports Series. This Fall, we will once again host our popular Platform Strategies event, where AI is sure to be threaded through conversations with industry leaders around topics like investment in innovation, the threat (promise?) of disintermediation, and the balance of risk and reward in fast moving areas like AI.
We hope you’ll join us there, on future webinars, or here, as we continue to share our learnings for the benefit of the scholarly community.
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