Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools continue to transform the way we work in 2024. In today’s dynamic business landscape, AI is a helpful assistant in nearly every industry, streamlining everyday tasks and transforming business practices with automation.
Generative AI (Gen AI) is at the forefront and reshaping competitive intelligence (CI). It’s speeding up CI research by automating data gathering and enriching data analysis for a more comprehensive overview of the market landscape in a shorter time frame.
CIOs are driving this new way of working. They’re spending an impressive 81 per cent of their budget adopting generative AI within their CI programmes.
Moreover, key decision-makers are increasingly utilising Gen AI make key strategic decisions. A survey by IBM involving over 3,000 CEOs across more than 30 countries illustrates this clearly.
Three-quarters of CEOs believe that their organisation’s competitive advantage will depend on having the most advanced generative AI tools . The survey also revealed that half of these business leaders have already integrated the technology into their business; 43% of them readily use it to inform their strategies.
It is however important for those, who are less familiar with generative AI, not to assume that an automated tool is enough to collect and deliver insights on its own.
While Gen AI offers valuable capabilities that contribute to better market research and competitive intelligence, human expertise shouldn’t be discounted to stay informed about market trends and competitors.
When we talk about Gen AI, think ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Bard – these are the heavyweights, the popular interfaces making waves in artificial intelligence.
But what is the tech sensation reshaping the landscape of artificial intelligence?
Gen AI is a revolutionising innovation, with its ability to learn and generate new information using large language models. It can generate content such as text, videos and images.
Plus, it understands the context and provides coherent responses to prompted questions. It’s like having a digital maestro that can create, analyse, and adapt, bringing a new dimension to how we interact with technology.
McKinsey, a leader in AI research, has crunched the numbers. According to their findings, generative AI isn’t a tech trend. It’s a potential economic powerhouse with estimated economic benefits ranging from 2.6 trillion to 4.4 trillion dollars across 63 diverse use cases.
The fast-paced digital advancements make Gen AI an essential element in driving business goals in a wide range of industries.
It has emerged as a powerful tool in market analysis due to its ability to rapidly merge and extrapolate various datasets with relative ease.
However, it is essential to acknowledge that Gen AI has limitations at this moment in time. These setbacks could impact the accuracy of the information it delivers to your CI strategy.
There are four areas where Gen AI could impact the accuracy and reliability of insights of an organisation’s competitive intelligence strategy:
At present still Gen AI lacks genuine comprehension and so it may not understand the context or nuances of the information it generates. As a result, it could cause the same issues associated with miscommunication, and thus undermine the value of the collated intelligence.
While Gen AI can generate coherent information for users, it may also produce inaccurate data, which could undermine company’s decision making process.
A striking example is from a fact-checking initiative by NewsGuard, where 80 per cent of ChatGPT’s responses to prompts about false statements in US politics and healthcare were found to be incorrect or misleading.
Ethical, impartial and unbiased data gathering plays an important role when interpreting information from multiple sources through artificial intelligence. AI could introduce potential biases because it can’t distinguish essential information from sensitive data.
This could lead to a one-sided perspective of the information gathered, compromising the analysis’s ability to remain impartial.
Gen AI is excellent at analysing targeted and credible information but has limits dealing with vast amounts of data and pinpointing the data set that’s required to make informed decisions.
If exposed to vast quantities of low-quality information, Gen AI might not be able to effectively ‘filter out the noise’. This can hinder the effectiveness of competitive intelligence programmes because data, that can make all the difference in key decisions, might not be utilised effectively.
To summarise, the impact of misleading information can have severe consequences for you and other key decision-makers who rely on real-time intelligence to make informed decisions.
Information lacking context, ethical considerations, or burdened by data overload may reduce the effectiveness of a strategy.
A lack of relevant or accurate information poses a major risk to decision-making, as it relies on insights that will not lead to action. This is where human expertise is still vital, as part of an organisation’s competitive intelligence solution.
Success in the age of data rests on a hybrid approach: the collaboration between Gen AI and human analysts with a breadth of industry knowledge. Gen AI at present only still has limited efficacy within a commercial setting, as we have already discussed.
Instead AI and human analysts have a symbiotic relationship, when it comes to an effective competitive intelligence solution. AI is here to support humans in order to do a better job, rather than replace humans.
Gen AI can collate and process a lot of information rapidly, while humans bring context that enriches the decision-making process. Human expertise and AI capabilities combine to:
The collaboration between AI and human expertise emerges as a strategic powerhouse you would want to take advantage of.
Competitive intelligence isn’t just a one-off task. It’s a continuous process that requires a lot of research and deep analysis. It involves uncovering every little detail about your market peers and recording it all in an organised way.
But the challenge is knowing what is important, why and who needs to know. This requires a nuanced understanding of the market and a deep familiarity with your competitors.
Despite AI’s ability to process large datasets and identify patterns, human experts, with sufficient industry knowledge and expertise in their fields, have contextual awareness and can add-value with their background knowledge, as well as spot little details, including misleading information.
They can interpret subtle cues, understand the nuances of market dynamics, and make informed decisions that go beyond the capabilities of AI. In situations where reading between the lines is necessary, the ability to exercise human judgement becomes extremely important.
While AI can process massive amounts of data, human analysts bring a depth of intuition and experience that is indispensable for interpreting data meaningfully and strategically.
They’re a worthwhile asset that can help decipher ambiguous press releases and interpret mergers or acquisition news. This results in valuable intel that uncovers your competition’s strategic moves. The information they gather can help you make more accurate predictions about your rivals’ next moves.
As we embrace the power of Gen AI, the importance of human oversight can’t be overstated. Human analysts provide the necessary ethical compass and ensure the responsible use of insights. They add the essential layer of judgement needed to interpret findings, avoiding the pitfalls of unchecked automation.
It’s a partnership that improves the abilities of both, elevating competitive intelligence to new heights.
A smart competitive intelligence solution that delivers actionable insights across your teams is essential to your business. A dedicated team of experts running it is necessary too, because their particular skill is knowing what is important. They can report actionable intelligence through the proper channels at the right time.
Only they can deliver strategic assets such as battle cards or competitor decks and feed into other sales enablement materials.
So, if you’re preparing to test out a Gen AI tool in your competitive intelligence process, you need a dedicated team member watching over the entire process.
Or, if you plan to integrate a competitive intelligence platform with your systems to improve your CI strategy, you need human expertise.
That’s how you will have an edge over competitors. With a competitive intelligence platform, you have a dynamic combination of a detected person and AI, uncovering everything about your rivals. So your dedicated CI team or marketer within your business can focus on delivering the actionable assets.
That’s why we advocate for a collaborative approach, which offers a balance between automation and human input. Together, you get faster intel gathering, but it’s analysed and curated by human experts, so the most relevant and actionable insights are quicker to access.
Prioritise a hybrid approach for more accurate and reliable insights. WatchMyCompetitor combines leading AI tech with human expertise, so you get curated, actionable intelligence and bespoke reporting.
Our competitive intelligence solution begins with understanding clients’ needs. Our analysts use their industry knowledge to meticulously curate data collated by our AI-powered platform. You get faster access to the intelligence that matters.
Our integrated approach of AI, human expertise and analytics enables clients to become data-driven organisations that outsmart the competition.
Our team of industry experts can streamline your decision-making process. By combining your curated intelligence with extensive industry knowledge, we unearth important trends and provide you with the actionable insights required to grow revenue and market share.
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