Banter
Besides spending time with clients, sometimes the most fun around here is the banter that runs through our internal channels. Here’s what we’ve been talking about these days.
We’re full-on preparing for the Outsell Summit, connecting with speakers, preparing our annual Outlook, talking about who will win and why, and who’s making what moves and why. We also turn the microscope on ourselves as we are of the industry we serve and as I am fond of saying – we don’t get a bye. Here’s some of what’s going through the Outsell-sphere:
What’s Thomson Reuters gaining by building its own model? The responses run from mitigating expensive M&A, therefore a better way to deploy capital, all the way to hedging against big LLMs becoming competitors. The overwhelming sentiment – not much really.
What are the implications of the push-me/pull-you of data center supply and demand and the constraints they face, including those of public sentiment?
Will we ever find a way to meaningful AI regulation without a catastrophe first? China’s motivations for regulation are very different than those of the US; history tells us bad things happen before regulation moves in.
Where is the moat? Was there ever one to begin with?
Who are the market share winners in each vertical (there will be two + a third and a fourth that is feeder fodder for M&A if history repeats itself) when it comes down to a big tech LLM that’s gone vertical, vs. incumbents, vs. AI Native firms or the largest SaaS player? Think Anthropic in Legal, vs. LexisNexis vs. Harvey? In other words, who wins the intelligent systems layer in each major vertical – where the answers and workflow actually get done by users and/or agents?
And who takes care of the poor enterprise customer that is trying to build airplanes or drill oil, or manage large retail presence, or process food, but who is now saddled with building internal LLMs, governing licensed sources of information all delivered via API or MCP, that naturally requires consolidation with (clean AI-ready) internal data, all while keeping token prices down while overseeing governance and ensuring end-users have the appropriate AI tools.
On the internal side?
Do our clients really need market sizing at a hyper-granular product category basis when history tells us most of this industry grows between 3-5 percent year on year for the last 30 years and the more valuable answers are in voice of customer analysis and competitive positioning relative to user stated and unmet needs? Sure, there are ebbs and flows and some big spikes in hot categories over time, but overbuilding for just-in-case is a thing. That debate is a healthy one. Stay tuned.
How come we are over-indexing on communicating while under-indexing on relevance and inadvertently adding to the noise under the auspices of serving? A major issue we are solving for.
What does it mean when one of our new Outsell Partner Views gets more readership than other content we publish? Curiosity about a new voice? More relevance? (There’s that word again.) Or simply, we serve a lot of CEOs who request PDFs be sent directly, and the pieces aren’t getting measured comparatively after all? Numbers are so tricky!
How do you syndicate for an industry where for 33 years the questions have all been the same but the answers are all different? Answer – you really can’t. There are some common answers, but then the model falls apart. We are adjusting accordingly, particularly as our clients’ needs become less about ‘their vertical’ and more about operating issues in their business model, “their horizontal”
Where and how is it best to recruit team members who fit the ideal profile of empathetic, curious, competitive, collaborative, accountable, and committed to excellence faster, better, and more cost-effectively?
What will be our Outsell meta theme for 2027? If you have any votes, let me know.
So much going through the Outsell wires. On Teams, email, on video. At our event! We’ll be discussing a lot of these in London next week and can’t wait to see you there.
Our speakers have real views on the moat, who will win and why, where the risk is and isn’t with big tech, and how to build culture and teams built for storytelling, problem-solving and agility with customer empathy at the core.
We’ll see you in London.