Macmillan staff say NOA, a Chaptr AI chatbot, was unhelpful and is now sunset

The NOA rollout was accompanied by unusual fanfare: purple balloons, banners, a doughnut plate spelling “NOA IS HERE,” and a name—No Ordinary Assistant—that many human assistants found offensive. In training sessions, staff were warned that NOA could hallucinate and would need fact-checking by humans, yet they were encouraged to use it for emails, marketing research, and idea generation, and were told to paste only a “percentage” of authors’ manuscripts into the tool. Later in 2024, Macmillan encouraged employees to use NOA to generate performance-review goals, complete with a specialized prompt. Several employees say the tool was unhelpful and unreliable, and one said no one used it. By October 2025, staff learned Chaptr would sunset NOA. Macmillan’s Kelly Collins disputed that the points shared accurately reflected how NOA was rolled out but did not specify which aspects were inaccurate. The episode sits alongside a broader pattern the body describes: staff at all of the Big Five publishers say executives push AI tools even as some divisions sue AI companies for copyright infringement, and bestselling authors say AI use is straining their relationships with publishers.