ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski (Carlo Carrehno)
By Carlo Carrenho, Contributing Editor
Last week, the U.K. publishing industry gathered at the Shaw Theatre in the Euston area of London for the spring conference of the Independent Publishers Guild (IPG). Artificial intelligence dominated the discussions, with consultant George Walkley helping frame a conversation that felt increasingly urgent: how fast is AI evolving, and what does that mean for publishers?But roughly 10 miles away, in Greenwich, another event was unfolding—one that may ultimately prove just as consequential for the future of publishing. At Magazine London, more than 1,000 attendees convened for the ElevenLabs Summit, the AI voice company’s second-ever global gathering, following its inaugural edition in California last year.
In many ways, the ElevenLabs Summit event felt deeply connected to publishing. Yet this was not a publishing event. The audience was not composed primarily of publishers. Instead, it reflected a broader technology ecosystem: venture capitalists, enterprise clients, fintech executives, product leaders, consultants, and developers.
Onstage in Greenwich, the word “audiobook” surfaced only fleetingly, mentioned a couple of times without emphasis. Traditional publishing appeared solely as logos—HarperCollins and Bertelsmann—on a slide of partner companies. And the agenda centered not on editorial workflows or rights strategies, but on enterprise AI agents, customer service infrastructure, and large-scale commercial deployment.
Still, in its brief history, ElevenLabs has become arguably the most influential force shaping the booming audiobook sector today. With its tools increasingly embedded in workflows across independent and self-publishing and gaining traction among larger houses experimenting with AI-assisted production, the future economics of audiobooks may now be, at least partially, tethered to the company’s development roadmap.
The Core Narrative
From the outset of the summit, the message was clear: In his opening keynote, ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski focused squarely on AI voice agents.
“Think about customer service,” he began. “Companies worldwide spend over $400 billion on it every year, and in general, the experience is at best tolerable.” He pressed the point: “The average UK resident spends 10 hours on hold each year.” That gap, he suggested, represents one of the largest immediate commercial opportunities in applied artificial intelligence. It was hard to disagree.
Live demonstrations reinforced the point. In one segment, Staniszewski simulated real-time interactions with a public institution, once in English and once in Polish, using AI voice agents that responded fluidly and conversationally. The emphasis was not on synthetic narration as content, but on voice as interface—as infrastructure.
The remainder of the program followed suit. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, discussed AI-driven customer service at scale. Panels explored enterprise marketing applications and implementation strategies. Jonathan Abrahamson, Chief Product & Digital Officer at Deutsche Telekom, brought the telecom perspective. The summit concluded with a venture capital conversation between Staniszewski and Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital that centered on startup growth and investment dynamics.
The throughline was unmistakable: ElevenLabs is positioning itself not as a media company, but as a foundational voice-technology layer for global enterprise.
Yet just two days before the summit, ElevenLabs made a move squarely aimed at publishers. On February 9, the company launched a dedicated audiobook production environment within its ElevenCreative, its broader AI-driven creative platform. The update consolidates manuscript upload, voice generation, editing, and export into a single interface designed specifically for long-form audio production.
Through this consolidated ecosystem, publishers and authors can now generate finished audiobook files in one place, edit and download them, then distribute the finished product directly to platforms like Spotify or through InAudio, the distribution arm built on infrastructure previously developed by Findaway.
Previously, audiobook creation within the platform felt modular—powerful but somewhat adapted from general voice tools. This new iteration is more purpose-built, suggesting that publishing remains a strategically important vertical, even if it is not the company’s largest revenue opportunity.
Relative to enterprise customer service, the global audiobook market is small. But proportionally, audiobooks continue to receive major attention within ElevenLabs’ product development. And for good reason: professionally narrated audiobooks aligned with text provide high quality training data for voice models. For AI systems learning cadence, pacing, and pronunciation, publishing is not merely a customer segment, it is also a developmental asset.
$11 Billion Speed
At the event, Staniszewski also highlighted the company’s recent $500 million funding round, which brought its valuation to $11 billion—a valuation that conveniently mirrors the company’s brand (and its lucky number).
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs has scaled with remarkable speed. Only a couple years ago, voice AI was a fragmented landscape populated by startups and experimental tools. Some early players have since disappeared; others remain niche. Even Google, despite vast resources, has struggled to build a defining commercial platform around synthetic voice.
ElevenLabs has taken a different path: aggressively productized, API-driven, and deeply focused on real-world implementation across industries.
For publishing, the implications are substantial. For example, one of the most potentially disruptive elements in the company’s ecosystem is the ElevenReader app. Instead of requiring a pre-produced audiobook file, the app allows an ebook to be rendered into speech in real time. A publisher uploads text; the user picks a narrator and listens. The commercial transaction may be structured as an ebook sale, but the consumption behavior becomes audio-first.
This approach raises obvious rights and licensing questions. Amazon faced similar resistance in 2009 when it introduced Kindle text-to-speech. Publishers objected on rights grounds, and in the end, Amazon ultimately allowed opt-outs that gutted the feature’s potential.
But rights frameworks have a way of evolving over time. And for nonfiction—particularly English-language, single-voice narration—some observers argue that AI voice is already commercially viable in many contexts.
Fiction, however, is a different story. Multi-character, emotionally nuanced performance still demands what human narrators uniquely provide: an essential qualitative edge that remains, for now, irreplaceable.
A Publishing Player
Audiobooks represent one of the highest quality thresholds for voice AI. Literary narration demands emotional precision, character differentiation, and tonal control. Moving from near-human to indistinguishable-from-human synthetic performance will require significant incremental investment. Which leads to a central strategic question for ElevenLabs: how far will the company go in its pursuit of perfection?
From a market perspective, enterprise agents and customer service dwarf publishing. Thus, one plausible scenario is that ElevenLabs stops short of full literary perfection, focusing instead on scalable voice infrastructure. In that case, premium fiction narration may remain predominantly human-led, while AI voices in publishing find their niche in nonfiction, education, and smaller language markets where the traditional production economics may not pencil out.
But an alternative scenario may hold more strategic value: The pursuit of perfection for audiobooks may be less about succeeding in publishing per se, than about strengthening the technological foundation for every other application. After all, the closer ElevenLabs moves toward literary-grade narration, the better its technology becomes across sectors.
As the summit in Greenwich made clear, ElevenLabs is not a publishing company. Its ambitions are broader, and its primary commercial opportunities lie in enterprise-scale AI voice infrastructure across industries. Yet the company’s impact on publishing is already tangible. From quality thresholds, to distribution architecture, pricing logic, and product integration, its decisions are rippling through the audiobook market.
More fundamentally, however, ElevenLabs is also redefining the relationship between text and voice. And by enabling models that blur the lines between ebook and audiobook, and by steadily narrowing the performance gap between human and synthetic narration, the company may well be one of the most important players in the publishing industry today.