Situational awareness is the key to relevance in the AI era
Legacy brands aren’t just slow—they’re blind.
Earlier this year, Walgreens announced plans to close 1,200 stores by 2027—part of a retail death spiral that has shuttered nearly 7,000 pharmacies since 2019.
Also recall Southwest Airlines’ disastrous meltdown in winter 2022, when outdated systems left them blind to emerging logistical crises, resulting in 16,700 canceled flights, $800 million in losses, and a swift 11% stock drop. (This event even has its own Wikipedia page.)
Another example is Peloton, which in 2021 was blindsided by rapidly shifting consumer habits post-pandemic. This resulted in inventory excesses, massive layoffs, and an 80% decline in stock over a single year.
The examples and the measurable destruction to market value are endless.
These scenarios weren’t primarily caused by operational flaws or poor product decisions. They resulted from a fundamental inability to see clearly and act decisively in real time.
Legacy enterprises, especially those operating at a global scale, aren’t just slow; they’re operating blind. Fragmented internal data, rigid structures, and delayed insights mean they rarely know what’s truly happening within their own orgs or, more importantly, with their users until it’s too late. And in today’s saturated, hyper-competitive environment, the brands that can’t see clearly and respond rapidly don’t just lose market share, but risk survival altogether.
This is the inconvenient reality behind the shift to a product mindset. You simply can’t act like a modern, agile product organization until you first see like one.
More than survival
Situational awareness isn’t just about crisis avoidance or damage control. It’s also the proactive capability that lets brands:
- Seize market share from slower and less informed competitors
- Anticipate and shape cultural shifts before they’re mainstream
- Attack emerging opportunities as they arise—not after they’ve passed
- Consistently show up as the most trusted brand exactly when customers are deciding who to trust
In other words, situational awareness today is like what having a website was 20 years ago: optional yesterday, existentially critical today.
You can’t operate like a product org if you can’t see clearly
Product-forward companies move fast because they operate on shared, real-time context. Legacy organizations don’t. Their data is fractured across tools, timelines, and teams. Their leaders aren’t unempowered because they lack vision but because they lack visibility at scale.
This isn’t just a data problem—it’s a clarity problem. And clarity is now the price of entry.
Real-time situational awareness is the unlock
Situational awareness goes far beyond traditional sentiment analysis. It’s the strategic unification of all data streams—social, news, search trends, internal campaign performance—paired with advanced predictive models to identify shifts in market narratives before they escalate.
It’s not just about observation. It’s about actionable insight: mapping current performance and asset health against historical patterns to forecast what will drive statistically significant lift.
No more guesswork. No more gut-feel media bets.
Our most forward-thinking clients already have the foundation
What we’re seeing across our clients is this: They’re closer than they think.
The infrastructure exists. The data is there. The frameworks to move are already in place. The only thing missing is a unifying layer that turns raw information into real-time, high-quality signals.
We’re already deep into auditing, testing, and activating these capabilities. Our most forward-thinking clients—global leaders sitting on some of the richest data ecosystems on the planet—are already closer to full-scale situational awareness and predictive intelligence than their competitors realize.
Within the next 12–24 months, these brands will operate on the most powerful AI-enabled business intelligence platforms ever seen. And crucially, they already possess the analytics frameworks and infrastructure needed to accelerate this aggressive timeline.
The next five years
Situational awareness → Predictive intelligence → Unified marketing engine
Here’s the trajectory we see emerging:
- Situational awareness: Unifying visibility across every channel and data stream, eliminating internal blind spots.
- Predictive intelligence: Moving beyond real-time tracking to predictive modeling that proactively identifies emerging risks and opportunities.
- Unified marketing engine: Fully integrating real-time insights, predictive capabilities, and execution across brand, media, product, and communications at enterprise scale.
Brands that reach step three in the next five years will dominate their categories. Brands debating step one risk obsolescence.
Real-time situational awareness isn’t just advantageous—it’s a mandatory stepping stone to relevance in the next five years.
The clarity it provides is the foundation upon which a truly modern, agile, product-oriented enterprise is built.
The future belongs to brands that can clearly see what’s coming and act decisively before anyone else even realizes the opportunity exists.
