ETL 28: IBM’s Cindy Anderson and Anthony Marshall on Quantifying the Value of Thought Leadership

Transcript: Alan Alper with IBV’s Cindy Anderson and Anthony Marshall

Alan

Let’s get started with a little discussion about the IBV mission. IBV has been around for 20 plus years. How has the agenda changed over time beyond just the accelerated progression of technology and business cycles?

Anthony

While IBV has been around just a little over 20 years now, I think it’s probably longer than that; it’s just that the formal entity has been around for 20 years. I suspect IBM has had a commitment, for longer than I’ve been alive, to really trying to improve knowledge and understanding and the world in general. I think that’s a very important part of the IBM mission, improving the world through technology. Thought leadership dovetails into that very directly.

IBM has been committed for years to investing in thought leadership. Not just for clients, but everything that we produce is available to everyone in the world at no cost. And we do an enormous amount of proprietary surveying, which we analyze and make available in terms of really trying to get a better sense of how technology changes business imperatives, changes the world. And so that underlying mission, I don’t think has changed.

The level of sophistication has certainly changed over the years. And I think the level of alignment between what we do in the IBV and the business imperatives of the IBM organization have become much more tightly aligned.

Cindy

I would add that the one thing that hasn’t changed, is the importance of thought leadership as really distinctive and evidence-based intelligence. That gives leaders the insights they need to make better business decisions. And I don’t think it will change. I know we’re going to talk about generative AI in a bit, but I don’t think anything is going to change the importance of thought leadership.

I think the alignment between the work that the IBV does and the strategic direction of the IBM organization has gotten much tighter over time. And we really do focus on thought leadership that helps business executives make better decisions relative to technology, business, and society. We think we sit at that kind of confluence of those three things. And that’s really how we focused our thought leadership portfolio over time.

Alan

In these times when things are changing very quickly, there’s a lot of chaos in the world, geo-politically speaking, and otherwise.  You would think that thought leadership today would be more important than ever before, right? So what are you guys trying to do differently to maintain its importance and to be able to make sure you’re achieving the goals that have been set for IBV?

Cindy

I’ll fall back on our history. I think less is changing and more is staying the same in that the IBV has always been known for data-oriented, authoritative, credible thought leadership that’s backed by research. And the research that we do has, if anything, just gotten more rigorous over time.

Anthony

We’re at a time with unprecedented levels of instability and uncertainty.  It’s global, political, terrible acts of terrorism, clearly. Back in 2008 it was the global financial meltdown that was having a profound impact. Eight years before that, we were in the dot-com crash and a turning point of technology.

Periodically, we’re always in these cycles. The consistent theme of thought leadership is that it needs to address whatever is happening in the world right now, but actually stay ahead of it. It’s very easy to think, okay, what’s happening in the headlines? What do I need to address today? But that’s what the media is for. That’s what the press does. Part of our role is to be some years ahead. So, the work that we’re doing in quantum technologies and the impact of quantum technology on security and on business and the like is a very clear example of that.

It’s not manifesting in demonstrable ways that are having an immediate impact on business right now, but it will very, very soon. Organizations need to get ahead of that curve, because if they don’t, others will, either nefarious actors or competitors, or both. Part of our job is to stay ahead of whatever is happening in the world. And make sure that we’re standing there to help people understand that clearly and to address that now.

Alan

Yeah, absolutely. Shining a light in terms of where things are heading. And helping your followers, the people who depend on your thought leadership, to have a sense of how to prepare and to be positioned properly to take advantage of the opportunities and to guard against the challenges. So how do you pick the topics and retain your deep-dive focus and maintain this fact-driven approach in a world, sadly, where sometimes facts are optional?

Cindy

I think that that’s exactly it. Anthony talked about staying ahead of the media and other content producers, including individuals, because everybody’s a content producer now, right? Influencers of all sorts. There are a lot of opinions out there. There are a lot of papers written on nothing but just, “I think,” or “my chatbot told me,” or “I did a Google search,” or “I read an article.” And I think the difference with the IBV is really that data and the outside-in perspective that we get by interviewing 60-plus thousand executives every year.

And you just don’t get that kind of business insight, that kind of world insight, by not talking to people who are living it, who are experiencing the business challenges, who are trying to work their way through the latest crisis or disruption. And that’s where I think thought leadership, the importance of thought leadership, is really heightened. When there’s so much content out there, when there’s so much information to sift through, business executives are really looking for something they can rely on.

And the IBV’s thought leadership is that kind of content.

Alan

I always [say], whereas everybody’s entitled to their opinions, the facts are the facts. But, Anthony, in these fast-paced times where everybody’s rushing to judgment, how do you maintain your agenda? How do you maintain the rigor? How do you maintain the quality behind what you do? Because people are looking for quick answers, sadly.

Anthony

You mention that people are looking for quick answers. That’s not what our research really has found. When we actually survey users of thought leadership, we find that they really want trusted [answers]. [With] thought leadership, there is a premium on trust. And we know from our data that a typical executive or CEO consumes thought leadership for at least two hours a week. We’ve actually seen that increasing over the last couple of years to three hours a week.

And we’re seeing that a typical executive only consumes thought leadership from five organizations. And part of the reason why they consume thought leadership from one of those five organizations is because they trust them. And so there is a massive trust premium. If an individual organization producing thought leadership is trusted, the likelihood that they’re going be one of those five organizations increases by more than 100%.

And to Cindy’s point about the proprietary data that we invest in, and the facts that we rely upon, and the rigorous analysis that we conduct…that is part of building that trust. Sure, brand is important. We’re very fortunate in some ways to have this legacy of the IBM brand. Because we know that we are in the top-two most trusted thought leadership providers in the world. So, we are lucky to have that. But the way that we sustain that is because of [our] consistency, transparency, and reliability that allows that trust to be there.

When people see our analysis and conclusions, they actually trust that what we’re saying is true and not just some marketing ploy or manipulation. They actually trust that the facts are the facts.

Alan 

You’re talking a little bit about the business value of thought leadership study that you guys conducted [in 2022]. We’re going to talk a little bit more about the findings [later]. IBV’s got a very broad agenda; you cover a lot of things. But you dive deeply and make sure you’ve got something that’s ownable, that you’ve got a unique perspective on, that is something where you can really offer prescriptions that help people understand not only what’s going on here and now, but also what’s coming down the pike and how to prepare for it.

Cindy

I think one of the ways we do that is to rely on the reputation that we’ve built over the last two-plus decades. For example, over the last 16 or 18 weeks, the IBV has produced a new report on generative AI, a CEO’s guide to generative AI, every two weeks. That’s unheard-of in the world of thought leadership. And part of that is because we do regular pulse research with these executives, with our research partner, with whom we’ve built this relationship, and this trust and this credibility.

We have the authority, the permission to do things like that. We’ve done research with somewhere around 6,000 CEOs and other executives over the course of the last five months and come out with these CEOs guides/reports every two weeks that offer three things an executive needs to know, and three things an executive needs to do. They are very quick, very easy to consume, very understandable, and very timely.

Alan

Credibility and trust are the foundation of what we do as a profession.

I would assume that when you guys are looking at your [research] agenda and coming up with topics, it’s done with a very pure educational lens. You’re not looking to push an IBM point of view or perspective, or even a product, other than the fact that you’re smart people; you’ve studied the problem; and you’ve got some ideas on how to solve for it. Would that be a correct assumption?

Anthony

So yes — but while we research principally around technology and the impact of technology on business, we certainly have other programs. Our diversity program is very important to us. Our program through COVID that covered things like loneliness and mental health was entirely appropriate to do during that period. Not to say that those challenges are not with us anymore, but they were incredibly intense during COVID, and it was very important that we have a voice in that.

But really, our research is around technology. IBM is a technology company, so there’s no surprise that much of our research is around cloud, hybrid cloud, hybrid technologies, transformation, generative AI, quantum computing, and all of these things. They are the principal focal areas of our research. And so, you could argue that we’re researching things that are really important to IBM. Of course we are, right? Of course our consultants and our sales teams and our engagement teams want to have conversations with clients about those things, right?

But what sort of conversation are you going to have with clients about those things? We need as an organization and we need as an IBV to produce content that is groundbreaking, fresh, unbiased, and really compelling. Otherwise, we’re not going to get that mindshare. CEOs and other executives are really clever people. We need to stay ahead and give them something they haven’t really seen before or ideas they haven’t really thought about before or implications that they haven’t really considered before.

And that’s part of our role in sort of staying ahead to give them that fresh content, that fresh insight that is genuinely new and provocative and useful. And that’s part of the role.

Cindy  

What I would add to what Anthony mentioned is that there’s a trust premium for thought leadership producers who are trusted. There’s also an independence premium, and this comes from the research that I know we’re going to talk about in a bit. But it’s important, to Anthony’s point, we research technology. I mentioned we sit at the intersection of research into technology, business, and society. That’s our sweet spot. However, if we were out pitching product through our thought leadership, that wouldn’t work.

What we see in our research, our thought leadership research in particular, is that there is an independence premium. Organizations that are seen as independent, or at an arm’s length from the organization’s commercial activities and enterprises, have a premium of somewhere around 140% or 130%  over organizations that are seen as more commercial. There’s a definite reason for us to focus on the foundation of IBM’s business, but to stay at  an arm’s length from an actual product approach or a pitch of any kind.

Alan

As Anthony said, If it’s blatantly obvious that you’re trying to pitch your own products, (targets) are going to see right through that. Why don’t we talk a little bit about the CEO study? For years, that was the marquee study. [CEOs] hungrily awaited that study. Can you talk a little bit about how your research there has evolved over time? And afterwards can we talk about your overall C-suite research report agenda and how you’ve consolidated and expanded it?

Anthony

Cindy, why don’t I talk about the history of the CEO and then maybe you segue to broadening it out a bit. I actually joined the IBV initially in 2011 to run the 2012 CEO study, which was around leading through connections. Which, given collaboration and stuff, was sort of obvious but not obvious at the same time. And this theme of being obvious and not obvious at the same time is pretty much a common one with the CEO. We’ve covered many topics over the years:  innovation, economic crisis — which was what we were talking about in 2008 — globally integrated enterprise, profound connectivity, open innovation, transformational sustainability, which was the theme last year, generative AI and this year’s theme of decision making.

You could say all of those themes are obvious topics, but it’s how you deal with them. And drawing out unobvious implications that chief executives and others can play upon. The CEO study, as you say, has been around since 2004, so it was one of the first major programs of the IBV. And it relies on the sentiment of CEOs. Nowadays we survey somewhere between 2,500 to 3,000 CEOs every time we do a CEO study. These are big expensive surveys and they’re deep surveys. And we need to start planning ahead, pretty much a year or more ahead.

Right now we’re actually fielding the survey instrument for next year’s CEO study, so we’re that far ahead and if something happens between now and then, we need to pivot. We had to do that with generative AI, for example. It’s always topical, but again, it’s always futuristic in the way that we approach very topical content.

Cindy

[What’s key is] our ability to focus more on emerging or maybe adjacent C-suite roles. We’ve always surveyed, as Anthony mentioned, CEOs and CIOs and COOs and all the major C-suite roles, but recently we’ve expanded into really looking at the impact of roles like Chief Supply Chain Officer, or CSCO. Before COVID, nobody talked about supply chain over dinner or standing in the driveway. During COVID, as soon as we ran into supply chain issues, everybody was talking about supply chain.

So the CSCO suddenly became a really important part of the C-suite conversation, and we were able to do research. We have what’s called a group of thinkers in our think circle that we get together and talk about issues in the supply chain area. Chief Sustainability Officer also is one of those kind of adjacent roles that we’ve now started focusing on — and have a think circle on. We have access to those senior leaders within an organization that maybe haven’t been considered as directly as part of C-suite thought leadership in the past.

Alan

One of the things I was thinking about in terms of the mechanics of how you guys do this [revolves around] trust and credibility. With C-suite executives, it’s hard for them to give up time [to respond to a survey]. In many cases across the board, they’re over-surveyed. There’s just a saturation of surveys out there. How do you deal with that? How do you make sure you get what you need from a research perspective so that you’ve got the right [demographic] quotas and the right sectors covered globally, so that you can really have something that is going to back [or disprove] your hypothesis?

Anthony 

Every survey is different. If we added together our large surveys and our pulse surveys, we probably conduct about 30 to 40 pretty substantial surveys every year. So we’re very good at it. And we have demographics each time we run a survey. Surveys are not cheap. They cost a lot of money. In order to get high-quality respondents, it takes time, money, and a lot of professionalism. [They’re] double-blind [and] the organizations that we work with have a reputation for conducting good surveys, and so we’re probably advantaged in that way.

Since they are double-blind, respondents don’t know that we’re involved, but they probably have experience and an expectation that the survey [should be] of a high quality. A survey has a narrative. And so  there is a logic to it … There is a very significant difference between doing a survey that’s badly designed and a survey that’s really, really well-designed.

And doing a survey that’s really well-designed is almost a pleasure because you’re actually learning things because of the progression of the survey. The survey is actually taking you somewhere. It’s almost like reading the [report] itself. A well-designed survey is mapping to the [report] that you’re trying to write and testing a series of hypotheses. Doing the survey actually brings you into that narrative as well. Doing a really good survey takes an executive on that journey.

In terms of demographics, we’re very clear about which industries we want to survey against, which countries we want to survey against, what size of organizations we want to survey against, what role we want to survey against, and so we have very specific demographics — all of which cost more money. But it’s better to have high-quality data that is more expensive than low-quality data that is cheaper.

Alan

Absolutely. So why don’t we segue over to your study on the business value of thought leadership? We alluded to it a little bit early on in this conversation. But I was wondering: Your study found that thought leadership’s return on investment was about 156 percent, which was 16 to 17 times greater than the typical marketing campaign. Can you walk us through your math and show us how you got there?

Cindy

It’s complex. You will be able to see all of the calculations and get a little bit of a calculator when the book highlighting this research comes out later in the year (2024). Generally to calculate ROI, you need just two things. And it sounds very simple. You need the income, that you get, and you need the expense or the investment that you make. From a thought leadership perspective on the income side, you need to understand what income you achieve as a result of the consumption of thought leadership.

That’s not so easy. And that’s why we did the research to deliver data that would help us make that calculation. The investment is going to change within each organization. Every organization knows how much they spend, right? So, we’ll focus on the income piece. It’s got basically 5, 6, 7, 8, depending on how you count, parameters that you need to look at. You need to understand the total spend in a typical client, in a typical person that your organization works with, that results from consuming thought leadership.

And that breaks down into basically three things. One is the total spend in an organization that’s directly attributable to thought leadership. And we know what that number is based on the research that we’ve done. There’s now data to help all CMOs, all thought leadership producers, understand what that direct consumption number is. The second thing is to understand how much spend is driven by thought leadership indirectly. And that’s a common category of spend within an organization.

And then once you understand that influence span, you have to calculate how much is realizable by one organization. Anthony mentioned that we know from our research that executives typically consume thought leadership from five organizations. You get a 20% realizable number there. So again, all of this is data derived from the research, from the survey that we’ve conducted for the first time that we know of from a calculation, calculating the ROI of thought leadership perspective.

You get your number of the spend in an organization, one particular organization, both direct, indirect, and realized. That’s not necessarily an easy calculation, but it does come from research that we have done. Then you need to understand the number of clients you have in your portfolio.  Because if you have the spend for one client, you need to multiply it by all the clients. You need to understand your mindshare, how much is being consumed from you versus your competitors.

You need to understand your reach. How far are you getting in the organization? How many executives are you reaching? How much of your client base are you reaching? And then you need to understand your profit margin if you’re going to use that to calculate your ROI. We know, based on history and conversations with our colleagues, that many of our them don’t have this information from within their own organization. It’s not easy to get unless you have the capabilities that Anthony has been talking about all along from a research perspective like what the IBV has.

We were lucky enough to be able to turn that research lens on the practice of thought leadership, and gather the information that we needed to be able to calculate this data-driven ROI. And that’s how we get to the 156% ROI for thought leadership in a typical $29 billion organization.

Alan

Very interesting. Anthony, anything you want to add to that?

Anthony

 Cindy’s got some fantastic comparisons in terms of marketing, return on investment of marketing, which we got from secondary sources. I think it was 8 or 9% [ROI] from a typical marketing program. And so you compare 156% to 9% and sure, there might be marketing programs that are far more effective than that, but that’s what the literature says on average.

And the return on investment from thought leadership is phenomenal. I mean, just amazing. If I had that return on investment from my retirement funds, I would be retired already, right? It is a huge opportunity. And that’s why I think we’re seeing the interest in thought leadership that we’re seeing right now — not just from our traditional consulting organizations, but across the board, whether they’re technology companies or staffing companies or architectural companies or engineering.

Alan

You touched on some of the more interesting findings — that execs now consume almost three hours of thought leadership weekly, and the more independent and rigorous the thought leadership is, the more influence it will have. [And] the average executive consumes thought leadership from five organizations and uses thought leadership to inform purchase decisions. We did a similar kind of study. We found very similar kind of things.

Was there anything that was really thought-provoking or that you didn’t expect to find? Were there things that [that the research found] that just reinforced your thinking … because as we all know, this has been something that people have been trying to figure out for some time. With all things marketing-related, return on investment is something that’s aspirational. It’s a little squishy, and you guys have really solved for it.

Cindy

Well, I think anytime you find the Holy Grail, it’s remarkable and unexpected. You know, when we went into this, one of our objectives was to be able to calculate a research-derived ROI. We honestly weren’t sure we’d be able to do it. It’s really gratifying that we were able to use the data from our surveys, our organization’s experience, and really calculate an ROI that we can stand behind, and that this this industry and this practice can stand behind. I mean, I wish I’d had it 25 years ago when I was starting my career. I’m just so glad that we’ve able to…calculate [ROI] and make it reliable and authoritative and believable for the people who are coming up behind us. I think it’s going be an immense tool, an incredible tool for them to justify the work that they do and to position thought leadership in the real place that it should be, which is the foundation of any kind of promotion or marketing or external brand-building program because the return is so high.

Alan

Do you see yourselves continuing to study this issue, or is it a one-and-done kind of thing?

Cindy

Anthony, I hope we continue to study it.

Anthony

I think so. It’s been enormously gratifying. It’s taken time for us to really translate the analysis into a book. I think we’re there. We’ve got a very robust manuscript that we’re working on right now. And the reason why it took a little longer is because this thing called generative AI hit. It was hard enough to quantify thought leadership ROI and talk about how to achieve the potentiality there, but then generative AI hit.

We had to really think through and do another survey on the implications of generative AI on thought leadership, and incorporate that in the manuscript as well. We didn’t want to go out and publish something that had really important but narrow relevance, because a lot of people are having conversations about the impact of generative AI on thought leadership. We wanted our book to incorporate that as well.

So not only has it been incorporated, but we’ve actually done additional surveying to get more insight. Because that’s our approach; that’s our philosophy. And so now we sort of cover both of those elements. Hopefully, we’ve got a very contemporary, forward-looking piece of analysis — that not only helps producers of thought leadership defend and define what they do and how they do it and make the business case, but also helps them conceptualize going forward how to realize thought leadership operationally within a world where generative AI is going to be ever more important.

Alan

Without giving away too much, can you tease out what some of your findings are in terms of the role the impact generative AI will have on the thought leadership craft?

Cindy

 I think we’ll learn a lot more as we go, but one of the most interesting things I think that we learned will the one that Anthony already mentioned: executives are spending an extra hour. So they’ve increased the amount of time that they spend with thought leadership, Maybe it’s not entirely related to generative AI, but related to this sort of citizen thought leadership, if that’s what we want to call it. With so much information out there, they’re spending more time with the organizations that they trust. I think that was an interesting finding.

I think the way that executives consider thought leadership that’s produced using generative AI [is interesting]. Anthony, you’re going to have to explain this a little bit better than I can, but we are seeing some conflicting data. Executives may be expecting thought leadership produced by generative AI to be more trustworthy than that generated or mainly generated by humans.

A  little bit more work [needs to be] done on that.

Alan

That’s counterintuitive.

Cindy

You know, we speculate on why that might be in terms of there being an early impression that generative AI was much more reliable than it’s turned out to be — you know, kind of pre-hallucinations and a real understanding that generative AI is really only reflecting what it’s been trained on. I’m anticipating that that’s going to change in our next look at the research, but Anthony, why don’t you dig into that a little bit?

Anthony

Sure. As Cindy mentioned, that was one of the early findings, but I think that really reflects a misunderstanding of how generative AI works and the importance of the corpus of data. People thought generative AI was like a magic wand: I touch [something] with generative AI and suddenly it solves all my problems. It brings creativity that I haven’t been able to have. And it’s this wonderful thing that can do things [that we previously couldn’t do]. It’s a wonderful tool that will evolve and become more and more useful, more and more accurate, more and more embedded in processes.

Why do we know that? Because we’re doing thought leadership on it. Because part of the IBM business is around process, design process, re-engineering and BPO (business process outsourcing). We’re looking at how to incorporate generative AI into a whole range of business processes. Thought leadership is a business process, right? And we’re looking at how to incorporate it. Initially, I think the executives who were surveyed were really bought in [on generative AI]. The understanding simply wasn’t there — even in the media — of how generative AI actually works, with how a foundation model actually works, and how the corpus of data is important.

When you’ve had companies scraping the internet on publicly available data, it was easy to believe that all required data was there. It simply wasn’t. None of our data, apart from our publicly available studies, would have been incorporated in that public corpus. The thing that we rely on is new data and proprietary data that no one has access to. It’s in our systems, right? And so no generative AI, apart from a generative AI that we have that is proprietary, has access to that data.

What we believe is that because of the likelihood that the overall amount of what people are calling thought leadership will expand, it’s likely that this trust premium — Who am I going to rely upon to provide really valuable, forward-looking content? — is going to grow even more important. The importance of proprietary data, proprietary analysis, will become even greater. And it wouldn’t surprise me that the number of thought leadership producers consumed is going to actually decrease for a typical executives, from five to something even lower than that.

So how do you become one of those organizations? How do you become one of those four or three organizations that executives really rely upon? Executives might be spending more time reading it, but they’re going to be reading it from fewer organizations and they’re the organizations that are going to be trusted.

Alan

It’s trust and quality. Absolutely right. One last question on the book. When will we see it? And do you have a publisher already?

Cindy Anderson

You’ll see it later [in 2024]. And we are in conversations on a publisher.

Alan

Keep us in the loop.

Why don’t we switch gears and go back to kind of mechanics. This was something we had talked about when we spoke a few months ago, about the fact that you guys are now embarking on some jointly branded thought leadership with companies like SAP and Amazon Web Services. Can you just talk a little bit about the motivation and how the partnerships work, and can you share some early results on how it’s going?

Anthony

Basically, IBM has supported and been an early adopter of open environments, open innovation, open source, all of this kind of stuff. Even in the last few days with the announcements around open AI and all this kind of stuff, there’s this historical commitment to openness and ecosystem. That being said, ecosystem in the last couple of years has become even more important from a business context for the IBM organization. You had asked earlier about how do we decide what content to produce and how to produce it. Our leadership asked us to go forth and start collaborating, with the ecosystem as defined, with the organizations that you identified and some others like Salesforce and Adobe and others. We wanted to be the tip of the spear and to build trust through co-branding thought leadership.

So we were able to do that successfully. Even when other organizations have thought leadership capabilities, the proficiency and the experience that we bring is pretty intense. We were able to go to partner organizations to say we wanted to work with them, co-brand with them, ask them what they wanted to work on, and then get that alignment and focus on what’s important to them and to the IBM organization. It’s been enormously successful.

In the last 12 months we’ve published 18 studies with partner organizations, co-branded pretty much from zero two years ago. And so that’s going to expand even further. The quality of thought leadership that we produce with these partner organizations is very high. The trust that we’ve built is very substantial. And I think it’s just the beginning of a more and more successful co-branding strategy that we have.

Alan

When I think about doing co-branded thought leadership, and I’ve done it in my past as well, a division of labor is very important. It’s sometimes very difficult, even within an organization, to be able to produce thought leadership by committee. You know, you’ve got egos, you’ve got vested interests, you’ve got people who think they’re smarter than others and whatnot. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with these third parties and how you come up with a plan that is good for all?

Cindy

It’s relatively simple. We have a tried-and-true process for building thought leadership and, given the theme of this conversation is trust, [we bring] rigor, authority, reliability [to that process]. Because we have that reputation as the IBV and as the producers of thought leadership. As you said, it’s never easy to produce anything by committee, but we are looked to as the [data-driven thought leadership] experts. We take the same process that we would have used internally and apply it from a project point of view to the partner work as well.

We have a research lead who serves as the point for IBM. We have editorial leads who create the content and then promotions folks who [handle] that. The only thing that is variable within the partner organizations is the approval process. And that really sits in their organization. We agree on timelines at the beginning. And I think, with maybe the exception of one report, we’ve not missed a launch date at all.

Alan 

How do you measure success, other than quantifying how many reports you’re able to put out and working with your partners effectively? What measures do you apply to show that this is really paying off — not just for you guys, but for your partners in that ecosystem?

Cindy

They want to work with us again. We want to work with them again.

Anthony

And also, we’ve got a whole bunch of metrics in terms of consumption.

But also, is the study being used as a strategic vehicle for our partner organization? And so when we released our study on sustainability with SAP, for example, it was profiled at SAPHIRE, which is the big annual event for SAP. And that was testament to the fact that it is seen as very, very important strategically for the SAP organization. And we know it’s important for us because it’s promoted by IBM. But it’s an enormous sign of success that it’s leveraged as a key vehicle for communication with our partners’ clients.

Alan

That’s testimony to its impact.

We talked a lot about generative AI, but what other tools do you see coming down the pike that are going to change the thought leadership landscape over time — not just in tech and tech services, but across the board? Is there anything out there that people are using, gravitating towards, feeling comfortable with from a research, writing, or production perspective that is the next big thing?

Cindy

I think it’s all generative AI oriented. There are things that that we’re starting to hear being used like synthetic data, right — not actually doing research but taking the results of previous research and creating synthetic data. Kind of fake data. You know. We’ll see we’ll see where it gets to. I think there’s all kinds of interest in and experimenting around content development using generative AI.

I think there’s plenty of innovation and interesting developments on the thought leadership front with generative AI. I haven’t heard people talking much about anything else that’s on the horizon. Anthony?

Anthony

None that I can talk about because this is part of our strategic differentiation. We have a few very powerful approaches that the technology is catching up on.

Alan

Cindy, anything that you see IBV doing differently over time in the marketing or dissemination of your thought leadership?

Cindy 

Well, I think the biggest, [besides]  generative AI news, which is top of mind for everyone, is hyper-personalization. From a marketing perspective, this means getting content to readers, to consumers, to the executives who need it on the topics that they need when they need it. I mean, marketers talk about that all the time, right? Getting it to your audience at the right time in the right way. I think now, the technology, to Anthony’s point, is catching up.

And we are going to be able to do lots more with respect to hyper-personalization, meaning getting you, Alan, the content that you, Alan, need when you need it, versus just people like Alan, which is kind of where we are today.

Alan

It’s beyond just going to your website and filling out a form and saying, I want this personalized for me. Yeah, I hear you.

Well, I appreciate your time. This has been an awesome conversation. Really thankful that you guys shared your insights with us and our audience. And I look forward to speaking to you again soon. Hopefully once the book is out, we can talk a little bit more about what’s there and what the future holds for thought leadership. So, thanks both for joining us for Everything Thought Leadership.

Cindy 

Thanks, Alan.

Anthony

Thank you, Alan. Great, great conversation.