Reference librarians forced to be 'AI experts' — AI‑augmented reference platform

Reference librarians forced to be 'AI experts' — AI‑augmented reference platform targets a $4.0B = 100,000 libraries & information units worldwide x $40K ACV (public, academic, corporate, school libraries, consortia) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12% — growing institutional AI tooling & digital transformation budgets.

Key trends driving demand: LLM conversational maturity -- enables AI to participate in reference interviews and synthesize answers reliably enough for librarian oversight; Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) -- allows integration of local catalogs and special collections to ground answers; Institutional AI governance -- libraries demand privacy, provenance and auditable outputs from AI; Hybrid workflows -- librarians will adopt tools that augment rather than replace interview skills.