MarTech Interview with Rob Fox, CTO, HG Insights

Hi, Rob. Welcome back to our Martech Interview Series. Since our last interaction in 2019, how has HG Insights evolved in the post-pandemic era?

We’ve been able to accomplish a lot of new things over the last few years at HG!

What I’m most excited about have been the novel applications of AI into our products. AI has been making headlines lately, but at HG Insights AI has been the star for over a decade — we have been leveraging AI for the past 13 years, and currently have five patents pending. I’m excited to share that one of our patents was approved just this week! It’s been exciting to see the market evolve. By using AI on a daily basis, we are today exploring applications of AI as it continues to evolve and revolutionize technology as we know it.

The biggest way we’ve evolved since we last spoke is that HG Insights made the shift to a product-led organization! We rely on our market-leading products, notably the HG Platform and connections from the Platform, to be the vehicle by which customers interact and extract data and insights from HG.

We have also introduced a range of new products and solutions! I’ll speak more about these later, but from a high-level perspective, HG has introduced many novel solutions to suit our customers’ individual needs (GenAI Navigator, Functional Area Intelligence, Partner Intelligence), including leading integrations (Salesforce Connector, LinkedIn Connector) and enhancements (Small Business Data Set, Quickstart Account Scoring)—to name a few!

Not to mention, we’ve helped move the market beyond technographics, into the world of Technology Intelligence. Technology Intelligence combines the following data to uncover accounts with the highest propensity to buy: IT install data, contract insights, intent signals and Contextual Intent data, spend analysis, Cloud Dynamics, and decision-maker data/influencer insights (via our FAI solution). And it’s so necessary because, in today’s market, technographic data doesn’t provide the larger, more dynamic context for account engagement.

You recently announced AI 1000 signaling AI maturity in progressive technology-driven markets. Could you please tell us how this idea was put into action at HG Insights? Could we have a larger database of AI-ready organizations in the near future?

Actually, a larger database of AI-ready organizations is already available to our customers!

First, I have to say I’m proud of our team for finding an engaging way to get the AI 1000 together, and in record time with outstanding results.

This project came from taking a holistic view of the market. We’re seeing lots of companies, both new and established, jumping into AI today. Many are building, or claiming to support generative AI initiatives, but there’s a real blindspot on which companies are ready and well positioned to do so. Taking this into account, we are trying to solve a gap in the market right now, at a time when companies do not know how to best position and bring their gen AI-related products or solutions to market.

We’re proud to stand by this as a ranking to guide business innovators with a holistic picture of the generative AI landscape and uncover opportunities in their markets.

And, I’m excited to share, we already have a larger database of AI-ready organizations available to customers with our Gen AI Navigator product, which helps customers plan and optimize their AI-related GTM motions.

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What are the benefits of relying on granular insights signaling AI maturity and generative AI intent?

Our insights help business leaders make better decisions. We’ve done this for 13 years, and our new lens on the AI market is no different.

This focus on granular insights that signal AI maturity and generative AI intent shows business leaders how to discover untapped potential and gain competitive advantage through early targeting based on best-in-class market intelligence. Our insights into the AI market enable leaders to identify businesses whose technology presence indicates they’re ready to pursue Generative AI. With them, business innovators can answer questions like:

1. How do I measure AI maturity for my customers and prospective accounts?
2. Which market segments are AI mature? And which markets are emerging?
3. Where is AI use accelerating the fastest, at a department and location level?

And, perhaps most importantly:

Which customers or prospects are AI-ready, but have yet to invest in a product or solution?

Not to mention, they are based on HG’s marketing-leading data-driven insights, which we’ve used to create the patent-pending AI Maturity Index, which includes insights from AI product adoption by a company, the locations where adoption is detected, the strength of these detections, and the application of an Ideal Customer Profile of data-related product detections.

What makes GenAI Navigator a go-to tool for business leaders looking to strategize go-to-market opportunities?

Across nearly every industry, generative AI is rapidly and progressively innovating how we work and communicate. Its impact on B2B tech is poised to grow as enterprises continue to discover more applications for generative AI to help them develop products faster, enhance customer experience, and improve employee productivity.

The GenAI Navigator helps leaders plan and optimize early go-to-market opportunities by identifying companies signaling AI Maturity and generative AI intent as determined by HG’s patent-pending AI Maturity Index. Our unique data, augmented with these insights, will further unlock our customers’ successes.

Also, using new patent-pending, machine-learning algorithms based on HG Insights’ Functional Area Intelligence, we detect the footprint of departments and roles within a specific company (such as data science, data engineering, and data analysts) and chart how they change over time. We can then determine which data science-related technologies are in use, where, and on what infrastructure.

So, by helping business leaders recognize companies signaling AI maturity and generative AI intent, the GenAI Navigator data subscription helps customers strategize early go-to-market opportunities, and then optimize their efforts accordingly.

Could you please tell us how a user could think about using GenAI Navigator?

Generative AI contributes to business value with new opportunities to increase revenue, reduce costs, better manage risk, and enhance productivity. It is set to be the differentiator between competing companies and will ultimately deliver a competitive advantage.

These are ways a user could think about using the GenAI navigator broadly, but here are some more direct use cases:

Understand AI maturity in your markets

• Understand where companies are in their AI journey with insights specific to AI product adoption
• One step further, to identify customers or prospects are AI-ready, but have yet to deploy and may need help adopting AI technologies

Access to best-in-class data

• Reach prospects much earlier in the buying process with trusted, quality data

Granular, powerful insights

• Identify businesses whose tech stack indicates they’re ready for generative AI and prioritize accounts based on 10 additional scoring types

Gather previously unattainable customer insights

• Uncover common attributes among accounts

Optimize sales and marketing motions

• Efficiently allocate sales and marketing resources by identifying key targets for advertising, territory planning, and prioritization through an AI product adoption lens

Another example of how GenAI Navigator also helps customers is by understanding which companies are ready to build generative AI solutions. With these insights, in combination with aggregated data points around Functional Area Intelligence and Contextual Intent, customers can understand which AI tools an account or prospect is already using, how mature their data science practices are (and where decision-makers are located), as well as which AI or generative AI-related products or services they are interested in.

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What’s your product and GTM strategy for 2024? Where is AI taking you next year?

Because we are a product-led organization, our product and GTM strategy will lead us in 2024.

We are sitting on a massive proprietary dataset that we use to mine a large portion of our intelligence, and we are currently experimenting with existing large-language models (LLM) to potentially integrate our own LLM into our products to allow customers to interact with HG Insights in an entirely new way.

All of these innovations are done in the name of providing insights to a wider audience. And to help our customers make decisions faster through AI-assisted features in our platform powered by an HG LLM.

There’s a lot to be excited about in 2024. And just like the applications for AI are seemingly endless — so are the uses for our Gen AI Navigator!