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Northern Light CEO David Seuss Discusses the Value of AI in Competitive Intelligence at Data Summit Connect 2021

“We are approaching the era when researchers will no longer search for information in the traditional way. They will expect their computer to know what they’re interested in, and to find the information they need on its own.”

This prediction by Northern Light CEO David Seuss was the culmination of his presentation, entitled “Three Ways to Make Competitive Intelligence Intelligent”, at the Data Summit Connect 2021 virtual conference.  Seuss focused on the growing role and value of artificial intelligence (AI) in knowledge management systems for competitive intelligence analysis.

Seuss opened his talk by summarizing the challenge competitive intelligence analysts face today. “We live in a Niagara Falls of competitive information,” he said, “and our job is to make sense of it all.”  Without the right technological support, Seuss noted, a person will quickly be swamped.

The AI-enabled innovations in knowledge management systems that can help include:

  • Smart taxonomies to deeply tag the content with context-specific and meaning-loaded entities
  • Smart summarization of the important ideas in a document, across documents, and across sources 
  • Smart distribution of insights powered by learning what each user cares about and find the relevant material without being asked

These text analytics and AI techniques work for a broad range of competitive intelligence content, Seuss explained, including all textual document formats (MS Word, PowerPoint, PDF, HTML, XML), primary market research, syndicated market research, business and technology news, technical journal articles, and conference presentations – in other words, virtually any document that contains potentially valuable competitive intelligence information.

“The impact of these analytics and machine learning trends on the socialization and utilization of competitive intelligence in your company will be profound and will change everything you are doing in your knowledge management system,” Seuss told the audience.

Watch David Seuss’ Data Summit Connect 2021 presentation here.

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