What data and AI still need from you

Sharing Experience: Matt Freestone, Unmatched

That includes how it operates. How departments hand work between each other. What’s in the tech stack, and how data moves through it. It’s establishing what makes it different from the business next door?

None of that is background reading. Knowing an industry is what makes advice useful.

We work across a wide range of sectors: insurance, health tech, facilities management, professional services and others. That’s not a coincidence; it’s a deliberate part of how we operate. The more industries we understand, the more patterns we can spot and the more useful we are to the next client in that space.

Because insight, for us, has two directions. It shapes the advice and the build for the client in front of us, and it builds our own understanding of that sector for the next one. A case study from a facilities management client teaches us something about facilities management generally, and that knowledge shows up again the next time we’re working with a client in that world.

Working across industries this way isn’t just breadth for its own sake. It’s how the advice stays sharp.

A combined approach

Data gives you the evidence, but it’s insight that tells you what it means.

Every business we work with has its own way of doing things, and there’s usually a good reason behind it. Processes get built up over years, often for reasons that made complete sense at the time. Our job isn’t to dismiss that. It’s to look at what the data and our experience across similar businesses are showing, and to be honest when a different approach would serve them better.

That’s a harder conversation than it sounds. It means being confident enough to say “we’d recommend X instead of Y” even when X isn’t what the client expected to hear. We can only have that conversation because it’s backed by something real (patterns we’ve seen play out across other businesses) not a hunch. The best outcomes tend to come from clients who are open to that and treat it as evidence worth weighing, not just an outside opinion.

Where we think this is heading

AI is changing a lot of this, and we think that’s a good thing. We use it ourselves day to day, and increasingly in how we work with clients too. It’s making data faster to process, patterns quicker to spot and reporting far more accessible than it used to be.

But it doesn’t replace the part that actually matters, which is knowing what a specific business needs. If anything, it raises the value of that.

As the tools get better, the businesses that stand out will be the ones that pair them with a real understanding of the business in front of them.

That’s the direction we’re building toward, and we think it’s an exciting one.