Hot Topics within the Data, Information, and Analytics Economy

We asked each of our analysts for the hottest topics in their sectors and found that there remains no shortage of issues in the data, information, and analytics economy. Here’s what came out of that internal exercise:

1. AI remains the biggest, most critical trend in legal and regulatory solutions. We’re seeing real applications in useful solutions for end users, such as VLex’s new Vincent AI research assistant, Casetext’s CARA AI assistant, and Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw Edge.
2. Within the scholarly communications sectors, Plan S and open access are the topic du jour. We’ve seen a change at the helm of Elsevier and continued heat from customers. At a recent conversation, we remarked about what happens when customers’ agita reaches epic proportions, leaving a hole for new models to emerge: Examples include rental models in the textbook world or Apple iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify as responses to the forced bundling of music. When pressure mounts, sectors break and new models emerge. We see the early stages of that in STM, but we’ve seen it before in other neighborhoods of our industry.
3. In education, digital solutions are still slowly being adopted, with rates of change behind the hype of EdTech and the re-engineering of education that’s claimed. Digital solutions must improve upon the print experience and lead to better learning outcomes. Take a look at the amazing new model underway in France.
4. In financial services, alternative data is the new oil, and the appetite for it is insatiable. Blockchain is still not being taken seriously enough, but it’s still early days for the distributed ledger. What happens to the world of credit when transactions are anonymized? It has promise and continues to be a key technology we have our eyes on for its impact across the industry.
5. In business media and business information, the bottom line is that companies must continue to diversify. It used to be that you could work across earned/paid/owned media, advertising, and data and intelligence, working with two or three in the business model mix. Today, it’s essential to participate across the board. Be number one or two in a segment, be hyper-niche, or hyper-scale — the middle market remains dangerous territory.

Across the industry, spanning all sectors, we’re seeing a continued influx of private equity ownership, reshaping the landscape with ever more M&A. Leaders are executing on their platform strategies, thinking about the importance of product management, and ensuring that data security and privacy plans are in place due to ever-increasing scrutiny, especially by customers. Enterprise purchasing departments are wielding clout, and we’re heading for 20-to-30-page questionnaires asking about all kinds of practices before buyers award a deal. APIs and UI or no UI (and in most cases both) are critical strategic questions CEOs are answering for their businesses and boards. The pace of technology continues unabated, and most leaders we speak with are adding more alphabet soup to their business repertoires: RPA, VR/AR, ML, AI, etc. You get the drift. There’s more change on the horizon, and never a dull moment in this sector.