Working notes — Editorial Intelligence

From one customer story to an editorial system

A visit to AFC Wimbledon reminded me that the scarce part of content is not the format. It is the access, evidence and relationships that make useful stories possible.

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Where editorial value is moving 12 min

Why frontier AI companies are paying up to $345,000 for editorial judgement

AI is making routine content production cheaper. Yet DeepMind, Anthropic and Roblox are paying heavily for people who can shape arguments, translate technical work and control narrative. The signal is not that writing itself has become more valuable. It is that judgement has.

AI visibility and GEO 10 min

When search becomes recommendation, evidence becomes the interface

AI search is not only changing discovery. It is starting to collapse discovery and evaluation into the same interaction, which makes recommendability an evidence problem as much as a visibility problem.

Field notes · Semrush Spotlight · London · October 2026

Three ideas from Semrush Spotlight 2026

I spent the day looking for practical signals about how AI is changing marketing, search and editorial work. These are three arguments I brought back.

Semrush Spotlight: What OpenAI's marketing workflows reveal about the future of marketing

At Semrush Spotlight, an OpenAI marketing leader described how AI is changing team structures, workflows and the value of human judgement. I compared those ideas with the AI-native publishing system I've been building for Editorial Intelligence.

9 min read → 02

Semrush Spotlight: Is YouTube the overlooked channel in your GEO strategy?

AI search is making video more interesting than a collection of clips and view counts. Here's a practical method to audit existing YouTube videos, match them to buyer questions, recover useful evidence and test whether the work changes what AI answers show.

20 min read → 03

Semrush Spotlight: Your website can't prove everything you claim

AI search can encounter what a business says about itself — and what customers, practitioners, publishers and communities say about it. The useful GEO question is where those accounts agree, where they conflict and which evidence gap deserves attention first.

17 min read →

By theme

The running arguments

The writing now clusters around four running arguments. AI visibility and GEO is one of them: a developing application of Editorial Intelligence, not a separate methodology.

Where editorial value is moving 47

Evidence and organisational knowledge 45

AI visibility and GEO 23

AI, judgement and practice 64

Three-part series

Judgement as infrastructure

How recurring editorial feedback becomes reusable knowledge, why the system still needs editors, and how one production can make the next brief smarter.

AI, judgement and practice Parts 01–03

Stop paying for the same editorial lesson twice.

Part one argues that repeated editorial judgement can become infrastructure. Part two asks how to keep that infrastructure from hardening into habit. Part three applies the learning loop to customer video, events and future briefs.

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New to the idea?

Start here

Three pieces, in order: what is changing in the market, what I think the response is, and why I would know.

The editorial jobs are not disappearing. They are moving upstream.

Job adverts from Mintago, Nscale, Paddle and Deepgram are converging on the same shape: as AI makes production cheaper, organisations are hiring for evidence, judgement, narrative and orchestration instead. That's the market signal behind Editorial Intelligence.

9 min read 02

What is Editorial Intelligence?

Most organisations do not lack insight. They lack a system for remembering it. Editorial Intelligence is the discipline of turning organisational evidence into reusable intelligence that compounds over time — and in an era of agentic AI, that discipline has never mattered more.

10 min read 03

From journalist to editorial architect

I have had five job titles. They look like a career progression. They are actually a single argument, developed over twenty years.

8 min read

Sizing me up for a role?

Five pieces that show the working

Alongside the three in Start here, above — these show judgement under real pressure rather than opinions about AI, and two are checkable against one real employer.

I've stopped optimising for the ladder. I'm optimising for leverage. A case for careers narrowing with age is easy to make: fewer senior roles, real ageism, tenure that counts against you unless you become an executive, founder or recognised expert. I think the sharper problem is that employers are bad at recognising accumulated experience — which is a different fix.

21 Aug 2026 9 min

Prompting is becoming routing Prompting is still useful, but AI work increasingly starts with a different decision: which model, tool or workflow should get the job in the first place?

24 Aug 2026 7 min

Raising the floor is not building a ladder AI can raise the standard of early-career output while removing the work that used to build judgement. New 41-country evidence suggests AI-adopting firms can grow while shifting employment toward senior workers — making the ladder problem harder to dismiss.

15 Aug 2026 16 min

Give every piece a job Most content plans are lists of things to publish. A portfolio is different: fewer pieces, each with a defined role — reach, conversion, practical utility or narrative development — and no piece measured against a job it was never given.

7 Aug 2026 8 min

When the best AI model stops being worth it Anthropic's most capable model is a small share of what businesses actually buy from it. That isn't disappointment with AI — it's evidence that for a lot of professional work, another increment of raw intelligence has stopped changing the outcome, and the advantage has moved to whatever surrounds the model instead.

23 Aug 2026 17 min

Evidence in motion

Signal notes

Shorter observations from research, events and source material that feed the wider evidence base.

GEO without a playbook GEO is too new for a settled handbook. That changes the job from learning best practice to building a reliable way of forming, testing and retaining practice while the field is still moving.

11 Sept 2026 10 min

If I were building a podcast for GEO, I'd start before recording John Lewis is commissioning a YouTube chatshow partly with AI visibility in mind. If I already had a B2B podcast and control of YouTube, I would use GEO much further upstream: to find evidence gaps, sharpen a few interview questions, publish useful chapters and transcripts, build stronger written answers and make each episode improve the next.

7 Sept 2026 17 min

A guide to GEO-informed thought leadership GEO gets more useful when it moves upstream: from optimising finished content to informing what an organisation investigates, proves, publishes and learns — while reporting feeds new questions back into what GEO measures.

3 Sept 2026 17 min

I only built shared AI memory because I was scared of losing it Shared memory was not an architecture I set out to design. It started with a much more ordinary problem: my AI history was tied to a work email I could not move without leaving the accumulated context behind.

31 Aug 2026 10 min

Are you getting the GEO value from all that video? The GEO opportunity in video may begin before the camera turns on: use audience and AI-search questions to decide what evidence the interview should acquire, then turn the resulting testimony into stronger written answers.

18 Aug 2026 19 min

Businesses need a better account of themselves Enterprise AI is running into a context problem. Giving a model more documents will not solve it if the organisation has never worked out which evidence matters, what has changed, or what any of it means.

18 Aug 2026 6 min

Don't just gather content. Gather the evidence you're missing. Events, webinars, interviews and customer calls are usually treated as raw material for assets. If an organisation already knows where its knowledge is thin, they can be used to fix that instead — which requires deciding what you want to find out before anybody turns up.

18 Aug 2026 7 min

Name the evidence you don't have A one-line discipline that changes how analysis is received: state the data you couldn't get, and downgrade every conclusion that depended on it to a hypothesis — before anyone else does it for you.

7 Aug 2026 4 min

Code red for MTD: what catching up actually requires MTD for Income Tax went live in April 2026. The first quarterly deadline is 7 August. For practices still catching up, the technology isn't the hard part — the operating model is.

30 Jun 2026 4 min

What Accountex 2026 revealed The Hidden Hours research launched at Accountex 2026 in front of the profession it described. What the room revealed in response was as significant as the data.

29 Jun 2026 4 min

The hidden hours behind late payments 86 hours a year chasing unpaid invoices. 133 million hours lost across the economy. The late payments crisis is not primarily a cash flow problem — it is a hidden work problem.

19 Jun 2026 8 min

What HMRC's digital transformation is doing to the hidden hours of accountancy Accountants now spend just 44% of their working week on core accounting and compliance work. The Hidden Hours of Accountancy research quantifies what the rest looks like — and what HMRC's modernisation roadmap will do to it.

16 Jun 2026 8 min

Event and editorial intelligence review: what the evidence shows A review of how events, research and customer insight fed into the Winning in Small editorial strategy — 32 content assets, two major narratives, and performance data that demonstrates what connected editorial systems actually produce.

9 Jun 2026 8 min

Sage Future 2026: The glass box — what AI trust really means for finance Day two of Sage Future made something harder to ignore. AI isn't just supporting finance work anymore — it's augmenting it. The question is no longer whether AI is accurate. It's whether you can see inside it, stand behind it, and defend it when it matters.

30 Apr 2026 4 min

Agentic AI in practice: how Sage is reshaping accounting with MTD The MTD for Income Tax Agent automates setup, quarterly updates, and submissions while keeping accountants at the helm. This isn't AI as productivity tool — it's AI as workflow infrastructure. The capacity question is no longer theoretical.

28 Nov 2025 8 min

The secrets of successful CFOs: what the research reveals A survey of 1,221 senior finance leaders globally surfaces three structural tensions in the modern CFO role — expanding responsibilities, an AI adoption gap, and a wellbeing crisis hiding behind outward success. The same patterns that drive hidden hours in accounting firms are reshaping the CFO role from a different direction.

1 Jun 2024 7 min

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