IT leaders still find value in market intelligence in AI era

Many IT leaders turn to market-intelligence giants for help with buying decisions, tech trends, user data, and more. But with LLMs becoming increasingly sophisticated, do these leaders still need human consultants to the same degree?

AI ay ay. The idea that professionals may substitute a chatbot for traditional market research is not so far-fetched. Jessica Maria, CMO at cloud services provider RapidScale, told IT Brew some smaller and mid-market businesses can find utility in using AI to craft their own reports.

“Not every company has the budget to leverage the big firms,” Maria said. “And so, there’s a lot of value in being able to generate some of that themselves.”

Henrique Teixeira, SVP of strategy at Saviynt, told IT Brew he has even seen a couple of instances where clients have tried to replicate market research reports with AI tools.

“They come to us and say, ‘Hey, Henrique, we created this GenAI comparison between Saviynt and this other competitor. What do you think?’” Teixeira said. “And I shake my head.”

However, Maria cautioned there are some risks associated with relying on AI for market reports, including losing credibility.

“While it’s faster in terms of running it through tools than going through a market research firm…where it slows down is in that effort of verification, validation, and nuance,” Maria said. “And so businesses who don’t take that step or don’t recognize that, I think do put themselves at risk over time.”

Still the golden standard. Despite the rising availability of LLMs and other AI tools, IT leaders are sticking by market intelligence firms for research.

And for good reason. Ariel Assaraf, CEO at Coralogix, an observability platform, told IT Brew AI can’t replicate the in-depth research and interviews that market intelligence firms use to craft their analysis and reports.

“Unless that data is somewhere on the internet, I don’t see how a model actually comes with the same level of insight unless it completely hallucinates it,” Assaraf said.

Teixeira added that data coming from another human has more impact, and companies shouldn’t rely on AI to be their only source for critical decision-making processes: “That’s a dangerous zone that I want my prospects, my clients to avoid.”

Market intelligence makeover. Maria said the market research industry is due for some change and that the days of long annual reports will soon be over.

“There’s a lot of research market analysis [and] competitive analysis that can be done using AI today,” Maria said. “I think that the research firms and the analyst firms that are going to be relevant in 10 years are going to have to make that part of their offering. How do they help get real insights that are nuanced and relevant to a specific user in their hands quickly?”

Some market intelligence firms are already attempting to modernize to better meet the needs of IT leaders. IDC, for example, recently launched IDC Quanta, an AI intelligence platform that allows users to tap IDC proprietary research and data directly in their workflow. Users can access Quanta in tools like Slack, email, and Anthropic’s Claude AI.

“Nothing else is working in a silo like that anymore, and market intelligence cannot afford to,” IDC CTO Joe Bradley told IT Brew. “So, the app is, of course, in some ways an answer to, ‘How do we behave with the AI tools we have today?’”

Bradley said the market intelligence industry is one with “staying power” and can play a meaningful role to businesses only if it transforms itself for the AI era.

“This is a little bit of the tortoise and hare coming together to build a family somehow,” Bradley said. “And I think we’re finding a good way to do that here at IDC.”