Hum, the leading provider of customer and content data solutions for scholarly publishers, today announced the launch of Alchemist – an AI engine that helps publishers derive deep content and audience intelligence from their data.
Alchemist uses a suite of Large Language Models (LLMs), deep neural nets, and clever algorithms to process and understand large amounts of centralized audience and content data. It works at the core of Hum’s customer data platform (CDP) to generate business-critical insights, recommendations, and actions.
“We’ve quietly been an AI company for the past three years,” said Hum Co-founder and President, Dustin Smith. “With the release of this new technology, Hum has evolved from offering narrow AI capabilities that solve single use cases to offering a general AI engine with almost unlimited application across publishing. Alchemist will let us realize our ambitions to be the general AI at the heart of research publishers.”
Hum and Alchemist give publishers an unparalleled depth of understanding of their audience and their content, transforming their abilities to:
- Understand every individual reader’s interests in infinite depth
- Identify new topic and content opportunities (for new special collections, journals, or products)
- Recruit authors, editors, editorial board members, and reviewers
- Segment their audience to target only those audience members who will be interested in a particular offer or message
- Communicate in real time to their entire audience with tailored messages when they are on a publisher’s platform
- Hyper-personalize content recommendations and ads to readers
- Predict future audience behavior (including identifying likely future authors)
“We see this as a landmark year – for the field of AI, for Hum, and for publishers and societies exploring how to use technology and data to realize their missions, serve their communities, and to succeed online,” said Hum CEO, Tim Barton.
“Publishers have successfully navigated the transition from print to digital. Hum and Alchemist will facilitate the next stage in publisher evolution: from digital to data and AI. And they should not underestimate the power of their first-party data in that evolution.”