AI in Market & Competitive Intelligence: powerful - but not a replacement for primary research

AI can speed up market and competitive intelligence by scanning, organizing, and summarizing huge volumes of information. But it cannot replace human-led primary research and field work, because the most valuable insights usually come from direct observation and direct conversations - things that never make it onto the open web.

AI is excellent at processing what already exists in digital form, especially public or internally accessible text at scale. That typically means it can help move faster on tasks like:

• Monitoring public content such as press releases, product pages, job postings, customer reviews, and news coverage, then flagging potential changes worth investigating.

• Summarizing long documents and consolidating repeated themes across many sources so analysts can focus their attention where it matters.

• Creating drafts of deliverables (briefings, competitor snapshots, talking points) that humans refine and validate.

Used this way, AI acts like a high-speed research assistant: it reduces manual workload, and improves coverage.

The hard limit: AI mostly works with what’s available online

A critical constraint is that AI cannot “discover” primary truth on its own. It primarily collects, recombines, and interprets information that is already available in the sources you give it (often public web content or your own internal repositories). If the most important information is not published, not searchable, not shared publicly, or not captured in your datasets, AI can’t reliably produce it.

Why humans can’t be replaced for primary research and field work

Primary research includes customer and prospect interviews, win-loss calls, ride-alongs with sales, trade-show conversations, store visits, mystery shopping, partner interviews, and hands-on product trials. These activities create original data that AI can’t fabricate.

Humans are also essential because judgment is part of research. In live conversations and field work, we assess credibility, detect hesitation, notice contradictions, read incentives, and ask better follow-up questions in real time - skills tied to domain expertise and situational awareness. AI can support the workflow, but it doesn’t replace the intuition required to interpret messy human reality.

The best approach: AI accelerates, humans validate, primary research wins

We use AI to accelerate the “desk research” layer - monitoring, summarization, tagging, and early hypothesis generation - then use humans to confirm what’s true through primary research and field validation. In other words:

• Humans do what only humans can: generate original insights through direct customer/vendor contact, and make the final calls with accountability.

• Primary data collection remains the differentiator - because that’s where the non-obvious truth is found, and where real competitive advantage is built.