Over A Decade of AI Innovations at HG Insights

International Love Data Week is a global celebration of data taking place every year during the week of Valentine’s Day, with the goal of raising awareness and building a community to engage on data-related topics such as analytics, data management, and research. In honor of International Love Data Week, in this Insider Interview HG Insights’ CTO Rob Fox shares how HG has invested in data-driven solutions — most recently by working around generative AI — for over a decade. Rob uncovers some of the recent product innovations and integrations at HG, and how he sees the rise of generative AI sending ripples across the entire technology market, including in how HG is developing new products!

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1. Rob, Happy Love Data Week! What are you most excited about for 2024 at HG? 

Thank you, every week is Love Data Week at HG Insights and we’ve been busy! We just had our annual Company Kickoff, which ended with a Hackathon, where HGers developed some really promising new solutions. We got our first patent and we introduced several new products and integrations (check out HG Wrapped, our annual product review!). For example, some of these exciting projects are:

• Salesforce Connector
• LinkedIn Connector
• Small Business Data Set
• Partner Intelligence
• Functional Area Intelligence
• GenAI Navigator

I’m most excited about our market-first GenAI Navigator, which enables customers to identify businesses whose technology presence indicates they’re ready to pursue generative AI.

2. So HG is already investing in developing solutions to provide insights into the AI market right now?

There’s huge hype around generative AI right now, but at HG Insights, AI has been the star for over a decade — we have been leveraging AI for the past 13 years, and currently have six patents pending. By using AI on a daily basis, we also understand its current limitations. Building on this long history, we are today exploring novel applications of AI as it continues to evolve and revolutionize technology as we know it. 

We’re always investing in solutions to help our customers be successful, this is part of the HG mission: To relentlessly discover and deliver Technology Intelligence innovations to improve business outcomes.

There are significant opportunities in the AI market right now, and we’ve seen a substantial surge in technology buyer research on generative AI. Businesses are struggling to understand where companies are in their AI buying journey. We assist these businesses by providing insights into a prospect’s AI maturity, cloud-centricity, and generative AI interest. 

These insights are crucial to ensure successful go-to-market outcomes — but they just don’t exist… yet. 

Want a sneak peek into the types of insights you can get with GenAI Navigator? 

The AI 1000 is the definitive list of AI-ready companies helping you understand a business’ AI maturity, cloud-centricity, and AI interest so you can capitalize on the wave of innovation in Artificial Intelligence.

3. How is HG helping customers navigate this new market?

Across countless conversations, our customers are telling us that there’s no way to know how to gain a foothold in the rapidly expanding generative AI industry. So, it’s become a question of supplying our customers with insights that will help them capitalize on the wave of innovation in generative AI. 

These conversations led us to see a gap in this crucial market, so we rose to the occasion to develop a new solution. The rapid growth in generative AI represents a golden opportunity for HG Insights’ customers and prospects. So really what we’re building is to help our customers capitalize on the wave of innovation in generative AI. 

Already, customers and prospects want to know which companies are ready for or investing in generative AI-based initiatives. Recently, our clients have been asking questions about the landscape of the GenAl market. Questions like: 

• “Which market segments are mature/immature as it relates to Al adoption to drive FY24 resource allocation?”
• “Which accounts do we prioritize based on their Al/data maturity?”
• “Where is Al’s transformation accelerating within client accounts?”
• “What does an Al mature organization look like from a technology adoption perspective?”
• “How do we start to compare Al maturity at the account, cohort, and market level?”
• “What are my clients, competitors, and partners doing differently to scale up their use of AI?”
• “Where is the use of Al by department accelerating fastest?” 
• “How much are accounts, segments, and markets spending on Al and how has it evolved in the last 12 months?”

These insights, which HG can now provide, are unique in the market today.

HG Insights customers and prospects want to know which companies are ready to, or are already, investing in generative AI-based initiatives, and we are here to help. After all, that’s what HG is here for — to empower companies and their business innovators with actionable insights to ensure success. At the end of the day, this is our key strength for our customers.  

4. What do these generative AI investments and innovations look like for HG customers?

Our industry-first generative AI solution — the HG Insights GenAI Navigator — identifies businesses that are ready to take the next step with generative AI and provides value to our customers by uncovering massive go-to-market opportunities.  

It unlocks so many opportunities. This solution empowers customers to understand the AI Maturity and cloud-centricity of a business to improve their go-to-market outcomes — something no other solution on the market can currently do. 

It scores companies with the strongest generative AI interest that we detect. Then, we show our customers what the main technologies in use are. And help make our customers more efficient and, in turn, more successful in their markets! That can look like anything from: 

• Delivering more value to their customers
• Innovating faster 
• Dominating their markets 

We’re already seeing success with the GenAI Navigator solution and lots of interest from customers and prospects. For more information on how companies are scored, check out our solution brief. 

Preparing for the next decade

As private and public sector organizations develop generative AI strategies tailored to their business needs, they are actively looking for third-party providers to help support their generative AI initiatives. Third-party providers incorporating generative AI capabilities into their own products and services will take priority over vendors who do not.

As we continue to innovate and push the limits of what’s possible with AI, these are some of the applications about which we are excited. And we look forward to seeing our customers continue to achieve impressive results.