Jason Bloomberg, Managing Director, Intellyx BV
The entire IT industry analyst business model has always depended upon the scarcity of information.
IT buyers have struggled with understanding what products are on the market, what their strengths are, and how they compare to each other.
In response, industry analysts have addressed these needs with market research, analysis, and product categorization.
No longer.
Today, AI is well-suited to complete all these tasks. Simply ask your favorite AI chatbot to summarize a market, analyze a vendor’s strengths and weaknesses, or to sort vendors into market categories, and you’ll get perfectly adequate answers – without necessarily spending a dime.
It’s no wonder the stock prices of the publicly traded analyst firms have been tanking.
There’s more to this story of disruption, however. AI not only dramatically simplifies research, summarization, and categorization tasks, it also provides radical visibility into the practices of the firms it displaces.
Remember, analyst firms have always depended upon the scarcity of information – not simply about the markets they analyze, but about their own business practices as well.
In particular, here are the three industry analyst practices that are no longer viable, given today’s era of radical transparency:
- Pay-for-play without explicit disclaimers – individual analysts may insist that their vendor analysis and rankings are independent of how much those vendors are paying their firms, but this pay-for-play arrangement has always been a poorly kept secret.
- Charging both vendors and end-users – many analyst firms charge vendors for access to research, advisory, and promotion to end-users while charging those same end-users for advice on technology purchases – an obvious conflict of interest.
- Having junior analysts do much of the work – that analyst report with the big name analysts on the byline? Junior analysts probably did much of the writing – some of whom are just out of college.
What, then, should you look for in an AI-era analyst firm? Here’s the list:
- No conflict of interest – the analyst firm should exclusively and explicitly provide paid services only to vendors or only to end-users.
- No bait and switch – senior analysts should do all the writing. True, junior analysts have to learn the ropes somehow, but not on your dime.
- 100% human – only hire analyst firms that exclusively produce original, human-generated, and insightful thought leadership content – the content that AI will never be able to create.
At Intellyx, we’ve always followed these three principles, since long before AI transformed the analyst business. We’ve served over 300 vendors in our 13 years in business, and now we’re riding the AI wave as well. Come join us.
Copyright © Intellyx BV. A human wrote every word of this article.
