Lex Academic®

Since the dawn of AI, peers, acquaintances, and former colleagues have all dolefully – even morbidly – speculated that it must have tanked our business, Lex Academic. I have to be completely honest: we are in fact having our best year ever. We have made more revenue in the past six months than in our best full trading year to date.

The projects coming in have become more complex, more valuable, and our clientele are among some of the most powerful people in the world. The relationships I have with returning clients have never been closer nor more intimate. In the age of AI, trust is priceless.

I understand that our burgeoning success could be explained by an increasing divide between rich and poor, and the world in which that is the reality is not one I blindly will. But our business is stronger than ever in the age of AI. We remain an entirely AI-free company and I believe that being amongst the few (if any) boutique author services firms to not invest in ‘AI solutions’ has yielded great dividends.

Sometimes it pays not to drink the Kool-Aid and to double down on the values that your ideal client shares: careful, creative, diligent work done to the absolute highest standards by editorial artisans with decades of experience.

Editorial prowess born of thousands of hours of practised craft produces a skillset that one applies like a rare elixir, and the results are frankly incomparable to the outputs being generated by LLM-powered workforces. Research that is nourished on the convenience fodder of artificial intelligence produces a scholarly environment that is sick and blanched, in desperate need of the succour that only artisanal editorial support can supply.

Delivering value in the age of AI has never made the mantra “the slow fast way” truer. Do things in a painstaking, meticulous way – absent technological conveniences – and watch the gap between ‘generic’ and ‘white-glove’ grow meaningfully wider (and with stark consequences for each business model).

Louise Chapman is the CEO and Founder of Lex Academic.