When I set out to write Digitally Curious, I knew I was taking on a peculiar challenge. A book about technology is, almost by definition, going to become outdated the moment it goes to print. The field moves too fast. Tools get superseded, platforms pivot, and the landscape shifts underneath you. So from the very start, I asked myself a different question. Not just “what do I want to say?” but “how can I make this live on long after the ink dries?”
That question led me to some deliberate, and in some cases, world-first choices.
CuriousGPT. A Living Companion to the Book.
One of the first experiments I wanted to try was training a custom GPT on the full manuscript and making it available to readers. The idea was simple: what if, long after the book was published, someone could still ask it questions? What if the book could answer back?
CuriousGPT. This is one of the first custom AIs built for a business book. Trained on the full manuscript, readers can ask questions long after publication.
It was inspired by discussions with my good friend Nadio Granata, a pioneer in building custom AIs for business books.
To expand on this innovation, recently I sat down with Andrew Hill from the Financial Times who tested the GPT ahead of his piece on the future of business books. He asked it what I thought about the physical book’s future. The tension, between the printed text as source of truth and AI as a living derivative of it, became a theme that ran through our entire conversation.
Georgia Kirke and the Edit That Made It Better.
Before any of the technology could shine, the manuscript itself needed to be right. That’s where Georgia Kirke and the team at Write Business Results came in. I’d had a couple of false starts handing over the manuscript. Life was busy, deadlines slipped. Georgia’s involvement solved that immediately, partly because having a deadline you’re paying for concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Her editor, based in Spain, gave me a note that I’ll always be grateful for. He said the book needed something more personal at the start of each section. Not just “here’s what you need to know about AI,” but “here’s why I, Andrew Grill, am curious about AI.” That one insight transformed the book. It meant adding an introduction to each of the five sections, covering AI, Technology, The Internet, Your Data and The Future. Each one explained, in my own voice, what drew me to that particular area. It made the whole thing more human, and paradoxically, more durable.
By the time the manuscript landed with Wiley, it had been through three or four rounds of edits. They barely needed to touch it.
The Short URL That Does More Than You Think.
Here is something most authors never consider, and it costs nothing to fix.
When you cite a source in a book, the traditional approach is to print the full URL. Something like: actionablefuturist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Andrew-Grill-Biography-2026.pdf
Nobody is typing that by hand. It’s nearly impossible. And if the destination page moves or changes, the link in your printed book is broken forever.
I used a URL shortener tied to a domain I own, curious.click. Every reference in the book became something like curious.click/bio. Short enough to type from the page. Easy enough to remember. And here is the part that makes it genuinely useful for an author: I own the redirect. If the destination changes, I can update it without reprinting a single page. And because I control the domain, I can see the click data. Which links are people actually following? Are they getting to the back of the book, or dropping off halfway through? That’s real reader behaviour data, which no publisher has ever had access to before.
Andrew Hill joked that this was essentially “hacking” the book. He wasn’t wrong. But it’s a practical hack, one that removes friction, keeps links alive, and gives me insight into how people are actually engaging with the content.
The Book as Calling Card.
One thing I didn’t fully appreciate until I became an author was the extraordinary social proof that a physical book confers. Andrew Hill described it brilliantly in our conversation as “the world’s heaviest business card.” He’s right.
For fifteen years of my speaking career, I was asked the same question: do you have a book? The answer was no. Now, when a client like Shell brings me in for an event in Turkey, I can ship 300 signed copies and hand one to every attendee. That’s not just a nice touch. It’s a signal. There is a barrier to entry to publishing with a major house. Clearing that bar means something. It builds authority in rooms where authority matters.
The physical book also solves a problem that pure digital content never quite manages. It’s tangible. It sits on a desk. It gets picked up by someone walking past. It triggers a conversation. That cachet, as old-fashioned as it might sound, is real and it compounds over time.
What Comes Next. The Choose Your Own Adventure Book.
The conversation with Andrew Hill pushed me to think out loud about where this all goes next. The book already exists as a physical copy, an audiobook, and a custom GPT. I used Google’s NotebookLM to turn it into an AI-generated podcast, a 31-minute version that was so well done I published it with a clear label saying it was AI-generated.
But I think the most interesting frontier is personalisation. What if your version of the book was tailored to your role, your level of knowledge, or your time constraints? What if an executive who has forty minutes could get a focused 100-page version, while someone who wants the full picture gets all 356 pages? What if the audio version became a “choose your own adventure,” where listeners are guided to the chapters most relevant to them?
I’m thinking about this seriously for the next book. Not to replace the printed text, which remains the source of truth, the version that was correct at the moment of publication, but to let derivatives of it evolve, adapt, and stay relevant.
The printed text is the anchor. Everything else is the ecosystem around it.
The Bigger Question for the Industry.
What Andrew and I kept coming back to was a question the publishing industry hasn’t quite answered yet: how do you monetise all of this? A QR code in a book is fine. But if a publisher could see which chapters people actually read, which links they followed, and which formats they preferred, that’s an entirely different kind of value. For the first time, publishers could know whether anyone actually finished the book.
Business books, more than any other genre, lend themselves to this kind of experimentation. Readers come to them expecting to learn something new, something practical, something they can use. Why wouldn’t the format itself reflect that ambition?
I don’t think we’re far away from seeing a new model emerge. I’m certainly not going to wait for the industry to get there first.
Digitally Curious is available now. You can explore CuriousGPT and all the book’s resources at digitallycurious.ai
