“I say there is no darkness but ignorance.” – Bill Shakespeare.

Many of us walk around our offices (Spare bedroom? Side porch?) in blissful ignorance. We have access to knowledge, data and each other, and yet, when asked, most leave many of these sources largely untapped. Why is that?

I believe that most knowledge within an organization is simply locked up. It’s not accessible or correlated. Even with each other, we have organizational mechanisms in place to restrict access to one another. Sometimes these systems are hierarchical, meaning that people literally cannot talk to someone based on rank and file.

Others are more humanly nuanced. We don’t speak to one another for fear of seeming ignorant or unprepared, rather than being simply curious.

Whatever the reasons, it’s a shame how much knowledge, how much intelligence, organizations simply leave buried deep beneath their proverbial ground. If I told you that you were sitting on top of a literal gold mine, you’d start digging. (Unless of course you think gold is worthless and start mining Bitcoin. Hey, man. You be you.)

As you might suspect, I believe AI’s true near-term value potential isn’t in robotics or self-executing software to automate the mundanity of life. In the now times, AI will unleash access to knowledge by synthesizing hard-to-correlate data streams into our everyday work. We don’t have a knowledge problem. We have a data problem. And nothing likes uncorrelated data better than learning systems like LLMs and other emerging tech.

At Ciceron, our work is focused heavily on the discovery of these untapped data, applying AI to them, refining the outputs so that real humans can make more informed brand and marketing decisions faster and more accurately.

It’s not that we’re finding “The Truth” in the data. That’s too heady. It’s that truth reveals itself when you can use AI to lay out the pieces in front of you so you can actually see the picture the puzzle is trying to reveal.

In our work, that means understanding consumers with more empathy, knowing what they really need by capturing human-to-human conversation and converting it to accessible and actionable knowledge. Basing your media strategies, creative briefs, and content needs against what’s actually being expressed by humans is waaaaaaaaay more accurate than using proxies like ad impressions and web visits. Yuck. That’s not knowledge. That’s noise.

There are such better ways. And the great news is the tools are finally here to make it much easier to access knowledge. Those who can capture and assemble disparate streams to inform the actual intelligence of a team and their organizations will set them apart for years and decades to come.