Making Every Word Count

How Industry Analyst Relations Is Evolving in the New Age of AI

What marketers, product leaders, and technology companies need to know about the shifting industry analyst relations landscape.

I’ve spent more than 20 years working in the Analyst Relations (AR) profession. Over that time, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with analysts at many firms, across a wide range of industries, technologies, and engagements. I’ve worked with large global analyst organizations, boutique research firms, and highly specialized independent experts. Each relationship has offered a different perspective on how companies communicate value, how markets develop, and how buyers ultimately make decisions.

Across those two decades, the AR discipline has steadily evolved. New technologies emerged. Industries transformed. Entire categories of enterprise software appeared where none existed before. Yet even with those shifts, the core purpose of analyst relations remained fairly consistent.

Today, however, we are living through one of the most far-reaching periods of change I can recall in my career.

The driving force behind it is artificial intelligence.

The Need for Customer Focus: Why Not Every Prospect Should be Your Customer

The Growth Problem Most Teams Misdiagnose

Growth problems are often framed as execution failures. The campaigns were weak. The messaging missed. The pipeline was inconsistent. In many cases, the real issue sits higher up the strategy stack. Before tactics, before automation, before AI-generated content, there is a foundational decision to make: what is the right customer focus that your company is truly built to serve?

This is the discipline of customer focus. It is one of the most overlooked fundamentals in modern marketing, and it is one of the most powerful. As a fractional VP of Marketing, I often see teams trying to fix performance with more activity. More content. Run more ads. Do more outreach. Volume feels productive, but volume cannot compensate for a lack of focus. If you do not clearly define your Ideal Customer Profile, every downstream effort becomes diluted.

Unlock Better Results with Clear Marketing Personas

What Is a Marketing Persona?

Marketing personas sit at the heart of an effective marketing strategy. If you have ever asked, what is a marketing persona, the simple answer is this: a marketing persona is a detailed profile of your ideal buyer. It describes who they are, what they care about, and how they make decisions. Strong marketing personas go beyond demographics and capture motivations, objections, and priorities.

From a Product Marketing Manager’s perspective, marketing personas are not optional. They are foundational tools for positioning, messaging, and product strategy. A PMM must understand the buyer deeply to shape features, benefits, and go-to-market plans. Without that understanding, marketing becomes guesswork dressed up as creativity.

Marketing Disruption in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Today, marketing disruption driven by artificial intelligence is no longer theoretical. It is visible in daily workflows, team structures, and performance expectations. Entire marketing functions that once required weeks of coordination now happen in hours. AI has compressed time, reduced friction, and redefined what effective marketing looks like.

How Effective Are You at Innovation In Today’s Relentless World of Accelerated New Product Introduction?

Most product leaders say they want innovation. Fewer leaders build it into their daily work. Many fall into a quiet routine. You hit deadlines, deliver launches, and show up at meetings. You get solid marks that feel productive. Yet productivity is not progress. Not anymore.

AI is shifting every market. New competitors rise fast. The gap between early movers and late movers grows wider every month. The rules are being rewritten. The pace is punishing. You cannot rely on the same systems that served you last year. You cannot expect current processes to keep up with new expectations. Innovation is no longer optional. It is the core requirement of modern leadership.

So the real question is simple. How do you bring new ideas, new approaches, new partners, and new technologies into your work? What pulls you into those new adventures? What signals tell you that you should change your habits?

How Do You Know What’s Being Said About Your Brand When You’re Not in the Room?

The importance of brand equity is one of the few constants in marketing. Everything else has changed. We’ve moved from print to websites, from static ads to dynamic digital campaigns, from SEO to social, and now to GEO. The channels and tactics continue to evolve at lightning speed. The way customers search, decide, and buy is completely different today than it was a decade ago. But one principle remains steady. People buy from a brand they recognize, trust, and feel aligned with.

That’s brand equity. And without it, no sale happens.

Brand equity is not just a logo, tagline, or color palette. It’s the sum of what people believe about you – your reputation, credibility, and emotional connection in their minds. It determines whether customers give you their attention, money, and advocacy.

Rock & Roll in Tech is When Hardware Meets Software

Picture the modern IT ecosystem as a stage under blinding lights. The crowd’s roaring, the amps are humming, and the show’s about to start. But before the first note hits, every musician must be in sync. That’s how hardware and software must work together today – not as separate parts, but as members of the same band, feeding off each other’s rhythm, tone, and timing.

The Edge Awakens: Why the Future of AI Won’t Live in the Cloud

For years, enterprises treated the cloud as the ultimate destination for computing. Centralized infrastructure promised scale, accessibility, and predictable cost. Data lakes grew endlessly, and AI models flourished in vast clusters of remote compute power. The future of AI may now bring the end of the cloud’s golden era.

The push to put everything on the cloud worked – until the laws of physics and economics caught up. Latency, bandwidth, privacy, and energy are now real constraints. Every byte that crosses a network consumes time, power, and money. As AI models grow larger and more complex, the cost of moving data often outweighs the value of processing it.

This is where the next chapter in the Future of AI begins. Intelligence is migrating from distant data centers to the physical world, bringing data closer to its source. The cloud was the foundation, but the Edge is becoming the next frontier.

Will AI Shatter the Old Walls Between Software and Hardware?

I’ve spent many years in high-tech leadership, having worked in several product marketing and analyst relations roles. I’ve overseen rebranding campaigns, new product launches, and messaging strategies, working with many teams focused on delivering products that bridge multiple architectures and deployment strategies. My experience has been primarily from a perspective of enterprise software. This includes understanding buyer personas, value propositions, and how to achieve the lowest total cost of ownership. More recently, I’ve begun working in the hardware and chip development industry, in the area of AI semiconductor design. Interestingly, I see more parallels today between the software and hardware industries – a convergence I attribute to the increasing influence of AI.

Now the direction is to orchestrate AI capabilities across hardware and software platforms. This shift is an “agentic” transformation. This wasn’t always the case. In September 2024, Salesforce was an early pioneer in taking a software approach to building agents. One of their Dreamforce 2024 tracks, Build Innovative ISV Apps with Agentforce, discussed how “ISV partners can build Agents and actions for Agentforce using Apex, flows, and prompt templates.”

I don’t recall any conversations about taking an agentic strategy to hardware back in 2024, but I might have missed it! My focus at that time was on closely monitoring the field service management vertical of the enterprise software stack.

The New Role of Analyst Relations in the AI-Driven Buyer Journey

Marketing has transformed many times over the past two decades. The rise of websites reshaped commerce. SEO altered how companies attract buyers. Now, artificial intelligence is driving another major disruption – possibly the largest yet. The constant theme is clear: how to best invest resources to elevate brand awareness and customer engagement. The methods keep evolving, and the rules shift every few years.

At the Product Marketing Alliance Analyst Relations Summit on August 21, 2025, this shift was on full display. I attended the track titled “If GenAI can’t find you, neither can your buyers: The new role of AR in an AI-driven, buyer-led world.” The session was hosted by Rick Nash, CEO of Spotlight, and James Cadwallader, CEO of Profound. Together, they addressed how LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and Anthropic are incorporating industry analyst content and other third-party sources to shape AI-generated outputs. The message was clear: the role of analyst relations (AR) is entering a new era of importance within the AI-Driven Buyer Journey.

Those interested in watching the entire presentation can do so by registering to attend the Analyst Relations Summit. Once you have registered and created a profile, you should then be able to access the recordings.