By Najat Kantouar

Informa aims to accelerate its top-line growth in the coming years with help from artificial intelligence, its chief executive said.

The U.K. events and academic-publishing group sees AI as a way to save time, make its marketing services more appealing to customers and generate more licensing revenue from content sitting in its archives.

"AI will enable us to spend less time on tasks that can be accelerated and more time on work that can be more impactful and improve the differentiation of our products," Chief Executive Stephen Carter said in an interview.

The company, owner of the Cannes Lions advertising festival and Taylor & Francis academic publishing house, has built an internal AI platform that it uses for tasks such as product creation, screening, event curation and marketing planning, Carter said.

In addition to using AI for its own operations, Informa has also licensed its archived data to AI companies including Microsoft, allowing them to train large language models with content beyond what is available from scraping the internet. While Carter declined to disclose the value of individual licensing agreements, he said they amount to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars collectively.

Informa merged its digital businesses with Nasdaq-listed TechTarget last year, forming a company called Informa TechTarget in which the London-based group holds a 57% stake. Carter said the business is using AI in a new marketing offering for the enterprise technology vendor community.

The deal with TechTarget and other recent acquisitions allowed Informa to expand its exposure in the U.S. The country represents nearly half of the group's revenue and its presence spans trade shows, conventions, healthcare events and academic publishing.

"The biggest market for us is the Americas and that is serving us well, because the Americas is still the biggest economy in the world," Carter said. "And that's been a big change for our company over the last 10, 12 years, and has been a large part of what has driven our growth," he added.

After a string of deals in recent years that reshaped Informa's portfolio, the company has been seeking to improve its organic performance and plans to keep focusing on that for the next year, Carter said.

In early European trading on Wednesday, Informa shares jumped more than 6%, leading the FTSE100 index, after the company raised its full-year guidance, increased its dividend and confirmed a share buyback of 150 million pounds ($203 million). Shares were last up 4.9%.

Write to Najat Kantouar at najat.kantouar@wsj.com

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July 23, 2025 10:38 ET (14:38 GMT)

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