I keep telling my kids that daddy’s job is to help beat the robots, and his weapon of choice is narrative non-fiction. I think I am only half joking.

A while back, we received a review for one of our titles which has stayed with me. It was of Galahad and the Grail by the poet Malcolm Guite. It’s the first in his epic four-volume retelling of the legends of King Arthur, drawing on the deep wells of Christian tradition which have shaped those stories. The reviewer, writing for the Times, looked at the beautifully produced artwork, the careful, expertly-crafted language and declared it "the antidote to AI slop". That the book existed at all was, the reviewer said "a miracle all of its own".

Admittedly that is an unusual book for us – fiction, at least on a surface level. But ever since we had that review in I have been thinking about those words, "antidote to AI slop", not because of their sales potential – though naturally there is that – but because they neatly encapsulate why I think we, and all of those who join us in the strange corner of non-fiction publishing which gets labelled "religion and spirituality", are in a unique, and rather exciting, position. We instinctively recognise that ‘AI slop’ needs an antidote. Or, if you’ll permit me, briefly, to use spiritual language, we instinctively recognise that content needs soul. That’s where I think we (publishers, specifically non-fiction publishers, more specifically religion and spirituality publishers) come in.

There have been rumours of a crisis in non-fiction sales, though I suspect they are greatly exaggerated. Okay – we know there are significant corners of the sector which are facing massive challenges from AI ‘How-To’, prescriptive books, for example. But there are categories within non-fiction which exist not to be useful but to be companionable. It seems to me that foremost among them (but perhaps I would say this) is religion and spirituality.

The future of non-fiction won’t be won by information alone, but by wisdom, voice and trust

In an age of AI-generated content, ours is a category with a particular kind of resilience. I can ask ChatGPT how to fix the dishwasher, or do crochet, or how to deal with that strange clunking noise my car is making.

But I cannot ask it anything about how solving any of those things might add up to a life well lived. I can ask it to plan my holiday, but I cannot ask it what there is to notice along the way. And I cannot get it to make me stop and breathe and actually pay proper attention to those things.

The books that will continue to matter are those which AI cannot replicate, because they are those that draw on history, on deep thinking and on story. They are not merely storehouses full of information; they are invitations into a whole tradition, a way of seeing, a conversation that started long before us and will continue long after us. Perhaps that is why, as Canterbury Press marks its 40th year in 2026, I find myself thinking not so much about longevity for its own sake as about what it means to have kept faith with that kind of publishing over time.

At their best our kinds of books avoid the arrogance of the now – the prevailing sense that we in our own time must surely understand better than any generation before what human flourishing looks like. They take the ancient, deep, search for truth and apply it to today’s world.

Narrative non-fiction in general, and religious and spiritual publishing in particular, have never simply been about telling readers what to think. They have been about helping readers to notice, to pay attention to language, to mystery, to nature, to beauty, to grief, to hope, to one another.

The future of non-fiction won’t be won by information alone, but by wisdom, voice and trust. AI may fill the market with empty functional words, but that only makes readers hungrier for books with depth and soul. Our AI models are getting very good at producing answers, but they are much less good at producing presence.

In a culture flooded with endless content, curation becomes more valuable, not less. For publishers and booksellers, the opportunity is not to compete with AI on convenience, solutions and speed, but to make the human provenance of a book unmistakable – the gentle guidance of a wise voice, the deep, long tradition behind it. Readers want a trusted gentle deep voice alongside them as a soul-friend, not a Large Language Model.

We are not there yet, but maybe there’s a day when booksellers feel able to give over more shelf space to prayer, pilgrimage and deep ancient wisdom, than to easy wellness hacks or instant expertise. I think it is coming. Because while AI, YouTube and TikTok can attempt to replicate one of those, only books can draw from the deep wells of the other.

And if I’m right that such a day is coming, maybe my kids can tell their kids about the time daddy beat the robots. Sort of.