Is CHATgpt a friend or an enemy of CI?

I guess if you read any of my columns you know what I am going to say. If you accept your position as an information bot (mislabeled as “competitive intelligence”), CHATgpt may signal the end of your employment. This will be a repeat of what happened when CI platforms started making inroads. A few researchers-cum-“CI-managers” lost their jobs when companies decided to connect their product marketing managers directly with a platform and skip the middle person of “CI” altogether. After all, human information bots (researchers, archivists, etc) don’t add much to what platforms like Klue can do, except cost. (Note: this is by no means an endorsement of Klue. I am using Klue as a clue to the unintended consequence of subscribing to a platform as a source of “intelligence.”)

However, CHATgpt can be a gift, and I don’t look a gift horse in his mouth. Actually, I don’t look in any horse’s mouth. Unless you are a horse trader, why would you look a horse in the mouth? ?OK, I should stop beating this dead horse (what a horrible expression. I am surprised PETA hasn’t marched on the White House to change it for its implied animal cruelty.)

Here is why CHATgpt is a gift

When Jan Herring and I started the Academy in 1999, we had a continuous dialogue about how to define competitive intelligence. Jan, coming from a senior government role, defined it as actionable information. I, coming from a business school, asked: What if management does not act, is it still intelligence? At the time we didn’t reach a conclusion. My question was more along the lines of insolvable riddles such as “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there” etc. You know, the wiseass academic question without any practical uses.

CHATgpt, at last, provides the definitive answer to this question not because it is a good product but because it is an idiot GIGO product. Ask CHAT to run an analysis on anything and expect garbage of the highest quality. @Glen Lyons demonstrated it by asking CHAT for a solution to electricity production in the US. The actions suggested by CHATgpt were well-regurgitated solar/wind/farts solutions the brain-washed programmers put into its database and omitted solutions such as nuclear, clean coal, carbon capture, etc. In short, CHATgpt is as good as any biased, "progressive" consensus.

So why is this relevant to the definition of CI? Because it demonstrates beautifully and decidedly that CI is not actionable information per se, unless you consider any trite action recommendation to be intelligence. Competitive intelligence is competitive insight- a whole different game, a tiny fraction of the space of all possible actions that has a chance of giving the company a leg on competitors. Or at least a toe.

Insight is never trivial. It is never a formula, and that's why Crony Consultants don’t have insights, they have skillful selling skills only to top management who lost their way. Similarly, CHATgpt can’t by definition produce insights because you can’t program insight into a database. Insight is always conditional on the situation, past data have little relevance, and CHATgpt, therefore, is not an enemy of CI analysts who are the true value-add part of the function.

The remaining “busy work” of compiling mere information can be done by CHAgpt or an insomniac high school student. Same difference.

I understand investors’ enthusiasm. OpenAI is now valued at $30 billion. I think the only delusion is that what happened to EV and Crypto companies is "totally different." The herd produces milk, but no honey. Good luck to those who see it as the future of humanity.

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Alternative perspective: In a recent Gartner report, the data company recommended product marketing leaders prepare for the future by upskilling their teams in competitive intelligence and recommended ACI for training and certification. As hard as it is for me to agree with anything these giants recommend, this one is not half bad. And it sure beats CHATgpt for competing in an open market (at least the part that is still open as governments worldwide play a bigger and bigger role in choosing winners and losers). I am now waiting for McKinsey and Deloitte to admit in a report that they need ACI to explain to them what CI is about. ?

This essay was written by CHATb-g, not CHATgpt.

If you want to upskill, listen to Gartner and join us in March for the CIP-I upskilling program. Registration - Enroll Now - Academy of Competitive Intelligence (academyci.com)