From Chaos to Clarity: GraphRAG, AI, and Process Orchestration

Artificial intelligence has become an inescapable reality in scholarly publishing, prompting many organizations to implement AI solutions without clear strategy or structure. As a result, we now face a fragmented landscape of AI initiatives that often create more problems than they solve, from inconsistent decision-making to unpredictable outcomes and mounting technical debt. Process orchestration, combined with Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (GraphRAG), offers a sophisticated path forward. Process orchestration provides the essential structure and control that AI implementations desperately need, while GraphRAG empowers AI systems with crucial context by leveraging the intricate network of relationships within publishing data. This powerful combination enables publishers to move beyond simple automation to truly intelligent workflows that enhance rather than complicate existing processes. Through real-world publishing examples, we'll demonstrate how process modeling creates the framework for effective AI deployment. You'll learn practical ways to identify AI touchpoints in your workflows, enhance them with GraphRAG capabilities, and implement the controls needed for quality and transparency. We'll explore specific applications in peer review, content classification, and author services, showing how these technologies work together to create reliable, scalable solutions. Join us to discover how leading publishers are bringing structure and purpose to their AI initiatives through systematic, process-first approaches. Whether you're beginning your AI journey or refining existing projects, you'll gain actionable strategies for orchestrating intelligent publishing processes that deliver measurable results.

Publication Date

May 2025

47th Annual Meeting (2025)

45

Although every year in the scholarly publishing ecosystem is a balancing act of innovation, optimization, and value creation, 2025 is shaping up to be particularly challenging as the pace and scale of change is accelerating more than we’ve ever seen before. There is increasing pressure to provide value to and to meet the incredibly diverse needs of the global research community while maintaining financial health for our own organizations, living our values, and continuing to protect the scholarly record. With AI, open access, integrity, and mistrust frequently dominating the conversation, we are in the midst of an unprecedented shift in both our industry and society as a whole. As always, the SSP community continues to focus on bringing together academics, funders, librarians, publishers, service providers, technologists, researchers and countless others with a communal interest and stake in disseminating scholarly information. We look to the 47th Annual Meeting as an opportunity to continue this tradition and welcome all colleagues and community stakeholders.