Two Conversations
Across today’s conversations, two seminal points stood out: “We went from CD-ROM to the web in twenty years and on-prem to SaaS in ten; SaaS moving to AI-powered intelligence solutions will happen in one.” Q1 in a nutshell: more disruption and so much of it happening faster and faster. The playbooks are changing daily; having one to change is essential.
We are informing those changes.
- We are in field with the Outsell Accelerate A! Assessment™ and you are welcome to participate. With 5 pillars and over 130 questions and an hour invested you’ll walk away with a scorecard you can use with your board, your executive team, and your company that is actionable. This is just the summary. It’s confidential. Join us for highlights next week at RevvedUp 2026. To take your assessment contact us.
We are in and out of the field looking at GenZ and Millennial views on event attendance. How many they attend, what’s most important about them (sneak peek: building industry knowledge), views on repeat attendance which is proving our point that events are not a moat with so much about them needing to be rebuilt and redone year over year let alone in an AI everywhere all at once world.
Within weeks, the enterprise value of pure-play SaaS companies hit the floor, and suddenly information was cool again. We painted that picture in our piece about aggregators and will be going over that too at RevvedUP 2026 next week.
The Collapse of Aggregators: 13 Essential Actions for Success in the AI Intelligence Era — Aggregation is no longer a destination product. As intelligence moves into workflows and AI internalizes discovery and synthesis, value is shifting from human-facing interfaces to embedded, machine-facing infrastructure.
Application software is out –> software with content hooks for third party and internally generated data embedded into AI-enabled applications is in. Intelligence systems or bust regardless of the business model. This pertains to ad-driven businesses too; just look at OpenEvidence as a great example and this recent analysis on the heels of the one above.
Wiley–OpenEvidence: A Turning Point for AI-Driven Information Markets — The partnership between Wiley & OpenEvidence signals a competitive inflection point not only in healthcare, but across the information services industry. It goes beyond a licensing agreement and demonstrates that controlling trusted content now defines the competitive moat in AI-driven workflows.
While you are at it, don’t miss these two pieces analyzing intelligence systems from various points of view –> incumbent and newbie; CAS and Anthropic have also cast the die.
- CAS Intelligence Hub: Changes the Rules of Scientific AI — CAS just moved up the scientific AI stack as Clarivate, Elsevier, and other information giants race to control enterprise intelligence layers; with CAS Intelligence Hub, competition shifts from who owns the most content to who controls AI-ready scientific knowledge infrastructure.
- Anthropic Builds a Small Bridge Across the Content Moat — Foundation model providers are no longer content to remain horizontal infrastructure — they are coming for the application layer, putting professional information vendors directly in the crosshairs.
We’re going to have great conversations next week at RevvedUP 2026, co-produced by H2K and Outsell. Rob, Andy, Jeannine and I are looking forward to seeing so many long-standing clients and industry colleagues over an amazing 2 days. It’s don’t miss! Look Who’s Coming.