William Reed is the 162-year-old, family-owned B2B information and events publisher focused on the food, drink and hospitality industries. Its £80mn revenue has multiplied more than 7x since 1995 when 100% of the profit had been generated by its founding UK magazine, The Grocer. At least 50% of revenue now comes from live events, powered by the highly successful ‘The World’s 50 Best’ series of awards for hotels, bars and restaurants. More than 30% of William Reed revenue now comes from outside the UK.
The company, which has won Digital Publisher of the Year awards in the UK from both the PPA and the AOP, will be featured in The Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events, in London, on 18 November this year.
John Barnes, a highly-experienced B2B executive (ex Incisive, InfoPro and VNU), is William Reed’s six-year chief digital officer. Here, he explains its AI journey.
What’s the essence of the AI strategy?
Our strategy for AI is built around a “AI-enabled, human-led” philosophy. Instead of chasing generic artificial intelligence or viewing it as a threat, the business treats AI as a powerful enabler to unlock and amplify our true competitive advantage: 162 years of proprietary, human-made industry intelligence.
Core pillars of the strategy include:
- “AI in the Workflow, Humans in the Byline”: This is William Reed’s operational mantra. AI is deployed to strip-out mechanical, time-consuming tasks, such as transcribing interviews, content optimisation, and dataset pattern recognition. This rebalances workloads, freeing up specialist journalists and experts to focus on nuance, context, human connection, and professional judgement.
- Building the “Food Brain”: The central technological initiative of the strategy is the Food Brain—a connected, living intelligence system. Rather than treating editorial, events, and data as separate silos, the Food Brain acts as a shared infrastructure using MCP technology to integrate inputs from all areas (such as our Lumina research, event transcripts, analytics, sales intelligence and customer behaviour). AI technology is used to organise and connect these data points, transforming them from descriptive records of what has happened into information that can help to develop predictive and prescriptive intelligence that helps customers make better decisions. The aim is to become an outcomes-focussed business.
- Proprietary Data as the Moat: The company’s strategic perspective is that “we are not chasing AI. We are building the dataset that will make AI useful in our sector”. In a market saturated with broad but shallow content from generic large language models (LLMs), William Reed is establishing a future competitive moat by investing heavily in verified, niche, and deep first-party datasets. Users can already experience this through tools like The Grocer Intelligent Assistant, which allows customers to interrogate decades of proprietary B2B coverage in seconds.
- “Community Beats Algorithm” : A guiding belief is that algorithms cannot replicate human trust, subjective experiences, and community belonging. For example, The 50 Best Restaurants rankings successfully compete against AI-driven lists because they rely on real human debate, regional disagreements, and emotional connection. The business prioritises becoming a destination brand built on direct relationships and owned communities, rather than relying on third-parties such as Google.
- Significant Financial Commitment: This transition from a traditional publisher into a connected intelligence business is backed by a long-term investment in data and AI capabilities.
What have been the most positive impacts so far?
William Reed’s strategic, “AI-enabled, human-led” approach has already delivered several tangible successes across the business. The positive impact of AI so far is highlighted by key achievements in product innovation, workflow efficiency, and industry recognition, summarised as follows:
Product and customer innovations
- The Grocer Intelligent Assistant (Miso 3.0): This AI-powered tool has unlocked decades of archival value by allowing customers to instantly search and interrogate 162 years of proprietary B2B journalism in seconds. The tool has now been rolled out to five other brands including Retail Week and NutraIngredients.
- Connecting the “Food Brain”: AI technology serves as the connective tissue of the company’s shared data layer, bringing together previously siloed knowledge from editorial archives, event transcripts, and proprietary datasets (like Lumina). Through natural language interfaces, it enables both staff and clients to easily query this combined knowledge, transitioning the company’s services from descriptive reports of what has happened toward predictive and prescriptive intelligence.
- New Commercial Data Assets: William Reed is deploying AI tools to scan editorial, event, and external sources to identify “people moves,” specific roles, and corporate activities. This process continuously enriches their first-party datasets and helps generate new commercial data products.
Workflow and operational efficiencies
- Significant Time Savings via Marbot: Internally, the company’s proprietary AI email tool, Marbot, has successfully streamlined content creation, cutting production time by 40% to 50%.
- Rebalancing Workloads: AI has been deeply integrated into administrative and mechanical workflows to take the friction out of day-to-day operations. Tasks such as transcribing interviews and live event sessions, identifying patterns in complex datasets, and optimizing digital content for discovery are now handled by AI.
- Freeing Up Human Expertise: Rather than replacing staff, this integration is viewed as a “rebalancing”. Stripping out repetitive mechanical tasks frees up specialist journalists and experts to focus their energy on nuance, context, emotional connection, and professional judgement.
- AI Hackathon: We held our first AI focused hackathon in May this year and set 10 teams of three people the task of prototyping and building a proof of concept for 10 key projects in a day. The results are being built internally now for introduction into the business by the end of this financial year.
Industry recognition
- Back-to-Back Awards: The company’s disciplined deployment of AI has earned significant external acclaim. William Reed won the award for “Best Use of AI” at the PPA (Professional Publishers Association) awards in both 2025 and 2026 and was recognized as ‘Digital Publisher of the Year” at both the PPA and AOP awards in June, the first company to do so.
The event includes CEOs and industry leaders from the following participating companies in the UK, US and EU:
Presented by Flashes & Flames.
