Why Analysts Matter More in the Age of AI
Every few years someone declares analyst firms obsolete. Today it’s because of AI. Before that it was Google, crowdsourcing, social media, or open source research.
Those debates usually center around whether analysts still have value. So far, the answer has always been yes.
The more interesting question is why end-user organizations continue to pay for analyst relationships while many vendors increasingly question them.
The answer has less to do with research than with the different problems each side is trying to solve, because vendors often assume the value of analyst relationships lies in changing what analysts say about them to end users. End users assume the value lies in changing what they themselves think about the market.
What vendors optimize for
Vendors typically approach analyst firms to improve market perception: stronger MQ or Wave performance, clearer positioning, better messaging, and broader analyst awareness. All of those are legitimate goals. But they share one characteristic: they are fundamentally self-referential. The conversation is about understanding and improving the vendor’s market position.
That leaves a different source of value largely untouched, because end users ask analysts questions that vendors rarely think to ask.
End-user clients pay to reduce uncertainty
The CIO, CISO, CMO, or product leader who subscribes to an analyst service comes with a different agenda. They ask whether they should buy, whether a category is real, what peers are doing that they might not have considered, whether to wait six months, and what risks or shifts they may not yet see.
They are reducing uncertainty before they commit money, people, business performance and reputation to a decision. End-user clients want to know what other organizations are asking, testing, and worrying about. They understand that perspective is part of the relationship they are paying for.
Who owns the seat shapes the relationship. On the buyer side, the user is often accountable for a decision that is still in motion. On the vendor side, the user is often accountable for how the company is represented. Both are legitimate uses and they produce very different questions.
The conversation vendors aren’t having
This is not a choice between influence and intelligence. Vendors can and should use inquiry for both results. The problem is that many programs treat inquiry as a chance to get an answer about the company, rather than a way to understand the market that will judge the company next.
End-user clients tend to seek this layer naturally because peer perspective and decision support are central to why they subscribe. Vendors have access to it too. They need to ask better questions and take those answers back into product, positioning, sales, and executive decisions.
Vendors can learn from the questions buyers ask analysts—not just from the answers analysts give.
AI makes living intelligence more valuable
AI changes the economics of published information. It can summarize research, retrieve public analyst opinions, and surface recurring themes across a large body of material quickly and at very low cost.
What AI cannot surface is the knowledge that lives in conversation or analyst notes which includes what analysts are hearing, what questions buyers are bringing this month, and what assumptions are starting to shift. That knowledge hasn’t been published yet, and it may never be. By the time research reaches publication, it is already a record of what the firm was prepared to say publicly. Conversational intelligence is closer to the decision as it is forming.
As AI makes published information cheaper and faster to retrieve, the relative value of that living intelligence increases. A company that reduces analyst subscriptions to access-only, or eliminates AR leadership because it assumes the needed information is available to models online is optimizing for the layer AI is already commoditizing.
The most astute vendor companies understand this and treat analyst relationships as a channel for market intelligence, not just market influence.
This isn’t an argument that analyst firms have perfect commercial models. They don’t. But frustrations with pricing and contracts are separate from the value individual analysts create. Confusing the two leads organizations to optimize away one of their best sources of current market intelligence.
