McGraw Hill, Pearson and Cengage’s latest financial results show higher education growth rates splitting apart on AI strategies and business models, while international markets proved problematic for everyone. Investors remain cautious, with all three seeing flat share prices or small declines.
The five largest listed scholarly publishers all grew in H1 2026, but only Wiley’s share price rose. The market isn’t rewarding AI exposure — it’s rewarding AI revenue that recurs, and punishing the kind that doesn’t.
RELX, TR, and WK all grew faster in H1 2026 than a year earlier, despite shares falling sharply on AI disruption fears. Investors are pricing a collapse that is not happening, but the risk is Big Tech AI costs a fraction of incumbents’ tools, but lag only slightly on quality, and keep improving.
Tax, Accounting & Audit reached $64.1B in 2025, up 11%, and is forecast to hit $82B by 2028. Workflow software drives 93% of revenue. Growth is led by AI, compliance digitization and audit scrutiny, while consolidation shifts buying power toward larger firms and trusted, integrated platforms.
Outsell’s B2B 100 segment view ranks top companies delivering industry media, events, and marketing services. Despite geopolitical challenges and AI threats, B2B 100 company revenue grew to $50B in 2025. Events once again sparked the sector and have opened the door to M&A activity.
ASME’s partnership with Articul8 raises the stakes for standards publishing: it tests whether innovation leadership can turn authoritative content into disruptive, AI-native engineering value.
Anthropic’s Claude for Teachers joins OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Teachers and Google’s Gemini for Education targeting the US K-12 teacher desktop. Each is betting on what wins loyalty: curriculum alignment, LMS embedding, or admin control, and each bet implies a different role for education publishers.
The Outsell 2026 B2B Buyers Study is a first. It shows the impact that AI tools and technology have on the buying process and reveals that AI has not only reshaped B2B purchasing by breaking down vendor selection; it is also reinventing the entire funnel.
How did your performance compare against your peers? The Outsell and M3 Learnings quarterly Sales Benchmark provides the data and insights to measure and improve sales performance.
Elsevier has added three new agentic AI tools to LeapSpace, grounding them in 20+ million peer-reviewed works. How well this platform, built on trusted content and embedded into user workflow, is able to help Elsevier counter AI-related disintermediation will provide a valuable industry-wide signal.
ASME’s acquisition of BSB Edge couples a major SDO with a mature regional aggregator at the very moment when publishers are rethinking channels, digital formats, and workflow integration.
Individuals from libraries, publishers, and research bodies have launched TrustMarc, a machine-readable framework making digital content’s trust credentials visible and verifiable to both humans and LLMs, and addressing users’ daily struggle to identify credible resources amid AI-generated noise.
The content-and-workflow consolidation has reached compliance, as Bloomberg Industry Group pairs its primary sources with Regology’s regulatory AI to move customers from awareness to action.
The Education market topped $100B in 2025, growing at 5% year on year. GenAI is reshaping classrooms, assessment is shifting toward portfolios and projects, and learners are demanding stackable, portable credentials with clear skills mapping tied to real-world employability and outcomes.
AI is not just disrupting your competitors. It is redrawing the competitive map entirely. Where your products sit on the Outsell Value Pyramid determines what plays are available to you. This playbook shows you exactly what to do next.
Springer Nature’s integration of AdisInsight into Claude highlights a strategic challenge that now confronts every information provider: how to create value when AI increasingly mediates the relationship between users and information.
