Today we talk to Matthew Kissner, CEO of Wiley. Matthew, or Matt as he is known, took on the role of CEO in July 2024. He has been with Wiley in a leadership, board, or consulting role for over 20 years, including as Group Executive and Board Chair. Matt has also held leadership positions with Pitney Bowes, Bankers Trust, Citibank and Morgan Stanley, and he has been a private equity operating partner focusing on business, financial and healthcare services. Matt is also a member of the Board Executive Committee of the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit urban research and advocacy organization. Matt earned both a Bachelor of Science in Education and Master of Business Administration from New York University.

What was your route into publishing? What barriers did you have to overcome?

I didn’t come into the publishing industry in what you would call the traditional way. The first half of my career was spent in banking and financial services. I first joined Wiley, and, by extension, the publishing industry, as a member of the Board of Directors. Wiley is a family company (in fact, the Wiley family has been involved since the company’s founding in 1807), but it’s also been publicly traded since 1962. As part of that, we maintain a commitment to a strong Board made up of a significant number of independent directors, and I was fortunate to be named one in 2003.

In the more than 20 years since, I’ve held a number of roles with the company, including Chairman of the Board, Group Executive, and, most recently, President & CEO.

Joining the company after my work on the Board prepared me well for being asked to lead a company in the midst of transition. When I returned as Interim CEO in October 2023, Wiley had recently announced a plan to intensify our focus on our strongest businesses, divest non-core assets, and right-size and streamline the company. I was fortunate to join a great group of leaders and a community of colleagues ready to take on that challenge. We set a new direction for the company, organized ourselves to be leaner and more agile, and got to work building Wiley’s future.

What are some memorable early career lessons you learned?
I think the start of your career is the best time to test yourself.

For me, I spent the early part of my career getting out of my comfort zone. My background was in finance and accounting, but when I got into the business world, marketing looked interesting to me, so I found ways to give it a try. Not only did I discover how much I liked marketing, I learned a lot about myself in the process.

I also volunteered for projects outside of my day job. It’s a great way to understand other parts of the company, work through issues that you don’t normally encounter, and expand your network. Those complementary benefits — practical experience, a broader perspective, and a bigger network — are hugely valuable.

Could you tell our readers a little about what drives you as a leader of Wiley?

First and foremost, it’s the purpose. Advancing science, enabling education, shaping the future of research and learning: this is an incredibly exciting field to be in. I’m part of a family of scientists and educators, so I get to see up close the effect of the work that we do. When you think about the impact that we have on knowledge creation and how that drives global progress, it’s very powerful.

I’m also very motivated by the opportunity to lead Wiley into its next chapter. When you work for a company that was founded when Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States, you’re part of a legacy of innovation. We started as a small print shop in lower Manhattan, and, in the 218 years that followed, have navigated the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Global Finance Crisis, multiple pandemics, and the digital revolution. That kind of resilience comes from a willingness to change while staying true to our core principles, and that’s our philosophy while we build what’s next for the company.

Right now, we’re focused on a few things. We’re growing our publishing programs by investing in new and established book authors, developing high-impact journals like our Advanced brand, and evolving our commercial agreements to align with the changing needs of our customers, most recently in major markets like India and Brazil.

We’re working to shape artificial intelligence (AI), not just by licensing our content for model training, but by building strategic partnerships with developers and R&D-intensive companies in healthcare, pharma, and chemistry who use our content to speed up product development. Corporations fund 80% of total US R&D investment, and we’re working to help them innovate faster.

We’re also obsessed with operational efficiency. Being a well-run, efficient company is essential to navigating a dynamic external landscape. It’s what sustains us for the long term, so we can continue to deliver for our customers, our authors, our employees, and everyone who counts on us.

As a leader in academic publishing, what most excites you right now?

We’re at a fascinating inflection point right now with AI, and it’s creating very interesting opportunities to reinvent how we approach publishing.

The speed of change is astounding, and the AI landscape is evolving in real time. We need to dive in, learn, and adapt. I’ve worked in other industries where players who failed to adapt simply aren’t here today.

AI is all around us, be it in publishing workflows, or in the promise and potential threats of LLMs. How do you see AI affecting your publishing life, research integrity and the communities you serve?

We’re at a pivotal moment where researchers are increasingly using Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI agents to intermediate their information discovery, meaning more machines are interacting with our content. We need to transform scholarly publishing from a “pages business” to a “pipelines business.”

For that shift to be realized, researchers need a publishing workflow where content remains in digital-native formats throughout the process and the work that publishers do maintains or adds (not reduces) semantic richness. The way we’re managing that is in large part through an integrated platform approach: our Research Exchange platform for submissions includes a content transformation layer and our distribution platform, the Atypon Experience Platform, enables both human and machine-readable outputs.

Integration and interoperability are critical. Publishers, for example, have an opportunity to seamlessly integrate library entitlements into the AI research ecosystem on campus, ensuring institutional subscriptions support the shift in discovery toward machine intermediaries. We also need both intelligent APIs that deliver relevant, appropriately licensed information and standards for AI research assistants that put scholarly search in context. The discovery tools will need to understand what scholarly search is, why it’s important to incorporate citations and annotations into their own reasoning, and how to produce outputs that are appropriate for scholarship. When we get to a point where autonomous intermediaries decide which resources to access and how to prioritize within them, standards that support those decisions will be critically important.

The benefits of designing for an AI future go beyond content discovery and consumption, of course. Take research integrity, for example. The issues that the industry is facing with fraudulent papers aren’t going away. In fact, AI is increasing the challenges with paper mills. Responding in kind, like using AI tools to assist editors in identifying suspicious submissions that require additional review, is critical.

AI is creating new applications for content. Model builders value scientific and scholarly content because it’s accurate, well-organized, and digestible. We’re seeing corporations develop specialized vertical-specific models. Pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and chemical companies are using our content to fine-tune general models for their specific domains. This aligns perfectly with our purpose as an industry, because building AI models on authoritative, evidence-based content improves access to validated, trustworthy information.

That’s not to say that there won’t be barriers to successful AI adoption. We know, for example, that authors are concerned about how to use AI correctly and ethically. We surveyed 5,000 researchers and found something telling: most of them believed AI would significantly change their work within two years, but they weren’t using AI tools extensively. Why? About 60% said they needed clear guidelines from publishers on safe, ethical use and proper disclosure.

Authors count on their publishers for expertise: in getting their message out, maintaining quality in the publishing process, and helping them reach people whose approach to discovering and consuming content is always changing. That’s as true in the AI age as it always has been.

How is Wiley positioned to serve the next generation of students, researchers and professionals?

To serve your customers well, you have to understand them deeply, and we’ve been a customer-led company for decades. Back in the 1950s, we were the first US publisher to send representatives directly to college campuses to see how our products were used and how we could improve them. Fast forward 70 or so years and you still see that customer-centricity on display through collaborations like the one we pioneered with Projekt DEAL, an agreement that transformed open access publishing in Germany and created a model for countries and organizations around the world.

This ethos of customer-led innovation is fundamental to how we operate, and it positions us well to serve the next generation of students, researchers, and professionals. Customer research, journey mapping, user experience design, voice of the customer programs, and continuous improvement feedback loops: all of these are tools we use to improve our knowledge of our customers’ needs and design offerings that solve our customers’ problems.

What truly sets Wiley apart, though, is our commitment to working as a genuine partner across scholarly communities. You see that in the way we collaborate with scholarly societies to publish journals on their behalf or provide services they need if they’d prefer to publish their journals themselves. You also see it in the approach we take with university customers and consortia to evolve our technology, publishing, and underlying business models.

As the needs of our users and customers evolve, bringing deep insights together with partnerships that drive change is a winning combination.

What do you anticipate the major challenges will be for Wiley, and indeed the publishing industry, over the next five years?

With the accelerating pace of change that we’re seeing, you can either find a collection of challenges to confront or a range of opportunities to take advantage of. I like to think it’s the latter.

But if there’s one challenge that feels bigger than others, it might be the growing public distrust of science. For too long, we as academic publishers — and the research and learning ecosystem more broadly — haven’t done enough to connect our work to its real-life applications. To some extent, that has made it difficult for people outside of scholarly publishing to really appreciate what we do.

The work we do helps turn data and information into innovation and progress. As an industry, we need to work hard not just to enable access to the information we publish and help new ideas spread as far and wide as possible. We need to make it clear how validated, evidence-based information is solving problems around the world. That’s one of the best ways we can confront the challenge of public trust in science.

In a climate of distrust in academic structures and science, how do you see Wiley helping scholarly communities navigate fear and complexity?

In today’s environment, Wiley’s role to safeguard the scientific and scholarly record, to facilitate the open exchange of ideas and discoveries, and to enable global collaboration for scientific advancement and societal progress is more vital than ever.

Fulfilling that role in a climate characterized by distrust, fear, and complexity requires us to build stronger connections, outside of and within scholarly communities.

For the segment of people who distrust science, it’s at least in part a question of perceived value. They see a disconnect between what they experience in their lives and what they believe scientific and academic institutions are prioritizing. That disconnect points to an opportunity to help people see how research can solve their real-life problems. One way to do this is by changing the way we communicate with professionals and the public. For example, we’ve been experimenting with helping researchers translate their work for more professional or consumer audiences, bringing authors from our journals publishing portfolios into our advanced content and trade publishing portfolios.

Within the scholarly community, strengthening connections requires transparency and responsiveness. To us, this means sharing information about changes in the landscape and how they affect our partners. It means listening carefully to the evolving needs of researchers, societies, and institutions, and adapting our approaches accordingly. And it means investing in infrastructure that benefits the entire ecosystem.

Wiley has always been about connecting people with knowledge that improves lives. In today’s information environment, staying true to that means being deliberate about how we build and maintain trusting relationships across the scholarly ecosystem and beyond.

What do the next generation of academic publishing jobs look like to you? How will publishing jobs evolve in an AI ecosystem?

Publishing has always been about personal connections, and I hope that never changes. At the same time, I’m very optimistic about human-technology partnerships driving work in the future.

AI tools help people do their jobs better. It’s not just finding efficiencies. People are bringing into their work new thought partners and extra pairs of hands in the form of AI. When you’re thinking about tooling up an organization, it’s important to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach, to carefully choose tools for different use cases, and then work to scale them across relevant teams.

What’s critical here isn’t just providing tools, though. It’s leaning into the growth mindset that I think characterizes much of the publishing industry. This industry is made up of incredibly smart people who are extremely motivated to do great work. I genuinely believe that human-AI partnerships will make that work even better, more efficient, and, frankly, more fun. But at the end of the day, we believe strongly that publishing is a human-centric industry, and we would never look to minimize the value of that human connection.

If you were to pick one part of your daily job as your favorite, what would it be?

That’s easy for me. It’s the people: spending time with my colleagues, hearing about their day-to-day lives, learning about the way that they work, what they’re proud of, what challenges they have, and how the company can help solve them.

I feel the same way about time with our customers. I love connecting with customers about their aspirations, their problems, and how Wiley can help.

I know I’ve said this a couple of times today, but this is an industry built on connections. For me, those personal connections are what make the work really fun and incredibly meaningful.