AI & Why Analyst Firms must review content licensing contracts

Do you know how your clients are using your content?

In recent years, big enterprise companies have worked with technology vendors to pull everything they’ve licensed from research firms into one convenient, searchable system.
Inclusion in search engines was acceptable under content licensing. However, analyst firms may not realise that their clients could now be doing something different with their content using AI-powered search. For example:

• It’s possible that your historical content is being fed into an AI model, which can combine answers to questions from multiple sources, meaning your clients may no longer need a subscription to your research.
• AI could provide answers from within your research to other users, but those users are not licensed from your perspective. In this instance, tracing the answer back to your research would be difficult.
• Technology vendors could be using your content to train an AI model, in which case it will become a permanent part of that model.

How concerned you should be about these uses of AI depends on where you make money and, therefore, how important it is that this IP is protected.

Identify the ‘crown jewels’ in your IP

Where you make money is where you should review your licensing agreement to ensure your valuable IP is protected from being included in or used by a third-party AI model.

As an analyst firm, there are certain products that make you money and others that you use to generate new leads. You may aim to turn consulting work into syndicated subscriptions, use your syndicated subscriptions to drive consulting work or use insights to drive customers to your data products.

You may not be concerned with the content you give away for free to drive leads. In fact, some of our customers say they welcome AI. To be in business tomorrow, they need to be producing new content that drives conversations and AI – with attribution – facilitates this.

Analyst firms need to define what constitutes their crown jewels in terms of products. They may also have a tier of content that they may or may not license but are happy for it to be discovered via AI.

Consult a lawyer to ensure contracts provide adequate protection

The answer to AI for most analyst firms is that they need to develop a slightly more nuanced view of their content.

If you’re considering licensing your content for AI, or you’re unsure how clients are using content, you should have an experienced IP lawyer inspect your Ts and Cs to ensure you have adequate protection against AI usage.