For a few years now, we’ve seen that new players to the SITech space are focusing on specific niches. This is clear in the diagram. However, we’re increasingly observing this in more traditional players as, sometimes through mergers and acquisitions, they choose to focus on a particular area of social intelligence for product development. We also know from this year’s State of Social Listening survey that practitioners are generally using multiple tools as it’s clear there isn’t one that can do everything. The variety of SITech shows that analysts have plenty of specialised tools to choose from.
We’re interested to see how this trend develops over the coming years and how it’ll affect the tools that take a more generalist approach.
Another clear trend is the increase in features aimed at improving productivity and helping companies to be more proactive. This is particularly the case for AI. Whether tools are AI-powered or AI-native, innovation in this space is heading towards creating software that can go beyond simplifying analysts’ workloads to becoming a virtual team member itself. As GenAI develops and the trend of autonomous AI agents grows, this is not an unlikely outcome. However, we shouldn't rely on AI.
With how sophisticated many GenAI agents are, it’s easy to forget that they don’t think like humans. They never will, which means, to get the best insights from social data, trained human analysts will always be needed.
And there are still flaws with GenAI. To trust it unquestioningly can get you into trouble. One area where this is clear is with data quality. If GenAI is drawing conclusions from bad data, the insights will be wrong. It doesn’t matter how you ask it, there’s no amount of prompting that can remove poor quality data from the results. There will always be a shadow of it there. That means work will still need to be done to clean the data first, which isn’t something a technology provider is always going to tell you.
Overall though, the direction SITech is heading is exciting. The fact the number of tools available has increased by around 20% in just one year - even once we factor in mergers and closures - shows there is still plenty of opportunity for innovation. This also means the tech sector sees a future in the practice of social intelligence. To invest in a still fairly young industry suggests there is confidence in its growth trajectory.
On top of this, the innovations we’re seeing do have the potential to make our jobs easier, which should give us more opportunities to focus on work that will have real impact. But only if we use the tools well. So we’re cautiously embracing the changes we’re seeing and looking forward to seeing what the next 12 months brings, when it’ll be time to start all over again...
