The Economics of Inquiry
Why Human Conversation Becomes More Valuable as Information Becomes Abundant
A major analyst firm appears to have made a decision that has ruffled the analyst relations community: it has significantly restricted the type of inquiry available to its vendor subscribers and recommended they use consultative, advisory sessions in their place. The rationale, as best anyone can tell, is commercial. Advisory sessions generate more revenue and take more time than inquiry entitlements. The math isn’t complicated and theoretically it frees up analyst time. The result is a substitution that makes commercial sense on one side of the table, but ultimately doesn’t quite succeed for either side.
Research gives you answers. Inquiry changes your questions.
When you leave a good analyst inquiry, you rarely think “I learned a new statistic.” You think “I didn’t know that market/competitor/customer tidbit, but it changes how I’m viewing my next go-to-market/product motion.” Those are completely different outcomes. One is information retrieval. The other is a change in how you understand something.
You cannot get the second outcome from a report. A report answers a general question for a broad audience. It does not take into account your particular situation and assumptions, or the thing the analyst said in the first five minutes that changed the direction of the rest of the conversation. Inquiry holds all of that easily. In fact it’s designed into the mechanism.
The Other Point Worth Noting
As I’ve written about previously, while most people think of inquiry as the benefit of an analyst relationship, I’ve come to think that’s backwards. Inquiry isn’t the benefit. Inquiry is really the medium that fuels the relationship.
Over time, a well-maintained analyst relationship accumulates something that no subscription seat can confer: shared context, intellectual honesty, pattern recognition across many conversations, and at the end of the day, a trust that makes the analyst willing to tell you the hard thing rather than the safe thing. Inquiry enables that relationship to evolve.
Remove the inquiry, and the relationship starts to stagnate from the loss of the stream of fresh dialogue and ideas.
And Then There’s AI
AI is already making information dramatically easier to retrieve, synthesize, and organize. That’s real and it’s having a significant impact on how the art of the entire analyst ecosystem develops. But let’s be clear that what it changes is the economics of information, and not the economics of inquiry.
AI Adapts Statistically. Humans Adapt Relationally
There’s an old joke in the analyst world that the most likely first answer an analyst will give to any question is “it depends.” When you ask an analyst a question, the answer shifts within the context of who you are, what you’ve said, what you’re worried about, what assumptions surfaced in the previous ten minutes, and what follow-up questions emerged from those. That interaction is impossible to publish in advance. It is also impossible to replicate through retrieval.
As information becomes more abundant, the scarce resource shifts. It moves from knowledge which AI can increasingly approximate, to judgment which is the domain of human experience, and more specifically, to shared judgment that can only be built through interaction.
Where Value Is Ultimately Derived
As AI changes how we access information, the thing we’re sorting out is which human conversations become more valuable and worthy when information is no longer scarce?
Inquiry is one of those conversations where two people with different perspectives can think together in real time, adapt to each other, and leave the conversation having revised something they each believed when they arrived. It is also not an advisory session which is really a workshop. Advisory sessions help you solve a problem. Inquiry helps you build a relationship. Those are complementary, but they are not substitutes for each other.
Inquiry is and will remain the heart and circulatory system of analyst and vendor relationships.
