Macmillan Staff Say the Publisher Threw a Party for a Workplace AI Assistant That Was Later Killed

In January 2024, Macmillan Publishers staff arriving at the publisher's Lower Manhattan office found purple balloons, banners, and light-up marquee letters announcing a new team member: NOA, short for No Ordinary Assistant. Doughnuts on a cafeteria plate spelled out "NOA IS HERE." Multiple employees tell WIRED the name was offensive to the human assistants it was meant to echo. NOA was an AI chatbot built by German software company Chaptr, which is backed by Holtzbrinck, Macmillan's parent company.

The launch email framed NOA as a closed enterprise tool where staff could "input proprietary information without the risk of sharing that data with any third party." Training sessions warned that NOA could hallucinate and always required human fact-checking, while still encouraging its use for emails, copy drafting, marketing research, and idea generation. Staffers say they were told to paste only a "percentage" of authors' manuscripts into the tool, and could adjust its tone across options including "lighthearted," "spartan," "sarcastic," and "regretful." By later 2024, employees were being nudged to use NOA for performance-review goals, with one email touting a specialized prompt that wrote goals for them.

But staffers say the tool failed on its own terms. "It was terrible, and no one used it," one employee says. In October 2025, a company-wide email announced Chaptr would sunset NOA. Leadership then moved to bring Google Gemini into the workflow, and some staffers experimented with using Gemini to evaluate literary agents' submission letters — an application one editor called "useless."

Macmillan's VP of communications and community, Kelly Collins, says the company uses Gemini for its "business" but that "there has not been any directive from Macmillan leadership to use Gemini for any part of the publishing process, including to evaluate submission letters from agents." She also disputes how NOA's rollout was characterized but did not elaborate on which points were inaccurate, adding that Macmillan takes a "thoughtful approach to AI" that keeps "people front and center." WIRED notes it is not naming staffers or authors over fears of professional repercussions.

Macmillan is generally cited as the smallest of the Big Five US publishers by books sold; its Farrar Straus and Giroux imprint publishes authors including Sally Rooney, Yiyun Li, and Ben Lerner, while Tor Books hosts John Scalzi and Martha Wells. Bestselling authors interviewed for the story say AI is straining their relationships with Big Five publishers. What remains open: whether a second enterprise tool can win over skeptical editorial staff, and how AI use in evaluating agent submissions will be governed — and disclosed — going forward.

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