Market intelligence and business intelligence: 2024 retrospective

In this month of January, like the two-faced god Janus, guardian of transitions and passages, it is traditional to take a retrospective look at the past year while looking towards the future of monitoring and business intelligence activities.

The TGV of generative AI: A hype cycle in accelerated mode around the contribution of LLMs in monitoring activities

Only 12 short months will have passed between the fear of AI eliminating jobs following the announcement of Onclusive and the convergent and reasoned feedback from market intelligence and analysis teams regarding the exploitation, possibilities and limits of generative AIs in the information cycle.

12 months of a frantic race that will undoubtedly continue in the coming years with the arrival of new models and services, the combination of different data processing approaches opening up new fields of innovation and possible support in the different phases of information processing.

It remains to be seen what industrial responses can be provided, on the one hand with regard to the security issues of internal, sensitive or secret information, and on the other hand with regard to the issues of trust and repeatability of the results obtained.

2024: Three decades of business intelligence since the Martre report

On April 8, 2024, the IE conference was held, 30 years after the publication of the Martre report and 20 years after the publication of the Carayon report: an opportunity for the pioneers of IE to look back on the development of economic intelligence, its practices, the difficulties encountered and the challenges to come.

The year 2024 is also marked by a significant change in the legislative context, with the inclusion of the concept of business intelligence at the heart of French law, including in particular a strengthening of foreign investments in the face of predatory acts by French companies.

Furthermore, the DGA is investing heavily in the fields of OSINT and economic intelligence with the inauguration of the OSINT Campus, two places dedicated to meeting OSINT players and developing expertise in OSINT tools and methods.

Let us hope that the coming years will allow the emergence of a national economic intelligence strategy and system that meets the challenges we face.

Changing gear: towards the decentralization of monitoring practices

On the EspritsCollaboratifs side, we have seen an acceleration in the questioning of information processing methods within organizations.

This observation, which is necessarily biased since Curebot is particularly recognized for the decentralized monitoring processes that we support for our major account clients such as Orange, RTE and VYV, shows a strong increase in monitoring projects open to a greater number of contributors, well beyond the historical monitors of the team or the core cell.

; several reasons explain this enthusiasm for decentralization of practices:

• Monitoring perimeters that are too large for monitoring, although automated, to be carried out without being distributed across a larger number of members of the organization.
• Monitoring topics requiring in-depth expertise that cannot be addressed without the guidance of the company's internal experts.
• Increased expectations in terms of information processing and analysis which cannot be achieved without monitoring work being better distributed in order to give back time to analysis activities and/or members of the company's organization putting their knowledge, skills and expertise to the service of analysis work.
• Needs for knowledge and development of professional skills which can only be met through the direct involvement of employees in these business sectors.
• Recognition of monitoring needs within a growing number of professions: business development, security, HR, communication, etc., beyond professions traditionally responsible for approaches such as marketing, strategy, innovation and R&D, etc.

At the intersection of information and documentation: A strategic convergence

In 2024, a significant shift is beginning within documentation teams, which have historically focused on managing and providing access to structured documentary collections (journals, subscriptions, physical or digital archives). Faced with the growing need for dynamic and up-to-date information from the web, these teams are strengthening their skills in strategic monitoring.

The accelerating need for live information—particularly from diverse and sometimes ephemeral web sources—is pushing these departments to integrate professional monitoring platforms, going far beyond the general tools used until now. At the same time, the circle of contributors is expanding: it is no longer just documentarians who feed these systems, but also internal experts from various departments within the organization, thus reinforcing the relevance of the analyses produced.

This change marks a major shift: documentation teams are becoming strategic players, disseminating their expertise in information management and exploitation across the entire company. This is a valuable lever in a context where controlling information flows is a key issue for anticipating and adapting to rapid changes in economic and competitive environments.

From monitoring to vision: the great return of foresight

In a context marked by successive crises and growing instability, foresight is returning to the forefront as a strategic necessity.

Societal upheavals—whether in work-life balance, corporate social responsibility, carbon footprint reduction, or redefining the meaning of work—require renewed thinking about the future. These "tectonic shifts" in values ​​and lifestyles require organizations to anticipate and adapt proactively.

Faced with these challenges, companies must develop engaging forward-looking visions capable of uniting their stakeholders around a desirable future. This future must not only meet employees' aspirations—in terms of meaning, ethics, and impact—but also offer clear and inspiring direction for navigating complex and uncertain environments.

This approach involves moving beyond traditional models to co-construct, with the organization's driving forces, scenarios that embody values ​​and meaning. A new approach to the "desirable future" is emerging, no longer as a distant utopia, but as an immediate lever for collective engagement and transformation.

Monitoring platforms: market consolidation that hides risks

The market for business intelligence platforms has seen accelerated concentration over the past 18 months, but this dynamic is not without raising real concerns.

The acquisition of Digimind by Onclusive, now under US control, illustrates the challenges of digital sovereignty. Beyond the loss of national control, this acquisition is accompanied by major information risks, particularly in terms of the confidentiality of sensitive data. The strategic orientations following the acquisition and the cessation of development on one of the historical platforms jeopardize pre-existing technological and organizational investments.

At the same time, Chapsvision's expansion into this market reinforces the concentration of offerings, raising new questions about companies' dependency. The dominance of a single player exposes organizations to multiple risks: unpredictable price increases, dependence on a technological roadmap that may not meet strategic needs, and the uncertainty of a potential acquisition by an investment fund. This concentration, while theoretically capable of ultimately offering integrated solutions, exacerbates the challenges for companies seeking to maintain flexibility, control, and diversity in their monitoring tools.

These developments raise questions about the resilience and long-term strategy of organizations dependent on these players, in a context where agility and digital sovereignty are becoming imperatives.

Increasing complexity of copyright management within monitoring activities

Copyright management in monitoring activities continues to become more complex in 2024, a turning point in legal tensions between press publishers and technological players, illustrated by record fines demanded from Digimind by press groups such as Les Échos, Le Monde and *Le Figaro as well as legal actions brought by a group of press groups across the world against publishers of generative AIs,* having exploited the publishers’ databases without authorization or further legal action against the social network X by the groups Le Figaro, Le Monde and Les Échos-Le Parisien.

In France, a new milestone has been reached with the withdrawal of several major French press groups from the CFC's "web monitoring" agreement. These groups have chosen to directly market access to their content indexes to monitoring platform publishers and information brokers, profoundly changing the rules of the game. While this approach aims to better leverage copyright, it relies on often outdated economic and technological models, thus limiting innovation among platform publishers and penalizing the companies that most respect the legal framework.

Starting January 1, 2025, the rules are tightening: it will be prohibited to crawl, display titles, URLs, or even the first few words of a resource from these groups, unless the publisher of the monitoring platform has entered into a specific contract with them. This development requires companies to redouble their legal vigilance, while rethinking their information access strategies in a context of increasingly restrictive copyright.