It’s an A.I. Company Now.
For nearly 250 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a bookshelf-busting series of gilt-lettered tomes, often purchased to show that its owners cared about knowledge.
It was the sort of physical media expected to die in the internet era, and indeed, the encyclopedia’s publisher announced that it was ending the print edition in 2012. Skeptics wondered how Britannica the company could survive in the age of Wikipedia.
The answer was to adapt to the times.
Britannica Group, as the company is now known, runs websites, including Britannica.com and the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, and sells educational software to schools and libraries. It also sells artificial intelligence agent software that underpins applications like customer service chatbots and data retrieval.
Britannica has figured out not only how to survive, but also how to do well financially. Jorge Cauz, its chief executive, said in an interview that the publisher enjoyed pro forma profit margins of about 45 percent.
The company is weighing an initial public offering, in which it could seek a valuation of about $1 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations who was not authorized to speak publicly.
