This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Security Business magazine. Don’t forget to mention Security Business magazine on LinkedIn and @SecBusinessMag on Twitter if you share it.
In December, the Oxford University Press selected “brain rot” as its “Word of the Year”– taking into consideration more than 37,000 votes, worldwide public discussion, and analysis of language data. Oxford experts noted that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence in 2024 “as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.”
It is with this inspiration that I, as Editor-in-Chief of an industry publication, do hereby proclaim the phrase “actionable insights” as the “word of the year” in security – taking into consideration not less than 15,000 uses in marketing materials alone, but also its use in trade show booths, keynote speeches, and basically everything else related to big data and the security industry.
Actionable insights – or its first cousin, actionable intelligence – have invaded seemingly every aspect of product marketing. Savvy marketers are pairing it with what should have been last year’s security word of the year, “AI-driven”…and still other marketers are going for the word of the year triple play: Mission-critical, AI-driven actionable insights. Sounds like a home run to me.
But is it a home run for integrators, consultants, or their customers? I would argue the triple play takes what might be something useful and shrouds it in something that has always been a buzzword (mission-critical), and something that is so overused it is almost universally overlooked (AI-driven).
That leaves this year’s word of the year, and that’s because marketers are figuring out that nobody truly knows what to do with all this AI-generated data, and that everyone thinks what they do is mission-critical.
So let’s define it in simple terms: Actionable insights are alerts generated by a machine that tell an actual human what to do, based on all the data available.
Now we’re getting somewhere. This is what Genetec’s Pierre Racz was talking about at Securing New Ground when he said he doesn’t like the term AI, but that he does like “IA, which is Intelligent Automation – where you put a human in the loop, and the human is going to provide the judgment and the creativity while you let the computer do the heavy lifting [ie. big data analysis].”
It’s not hard to find actionable insights in the pages of this very magazine. There’s an article on intelligent traffic management technology, where actionable insights are creating a bonafide business opportunity for integrators in an emerging vertical market. You’d better believe that Eric Yunag of Convergint – the primary source in our cover story on the evolution of the channel – is talking about actionable insights when it comes to the changing role of the integrator.
Everywhere AI is being touted, actionable insights are what’s lurking underneath – it just took a while for marketers to figure out this is what people needed.
So, perhaps for a change, the marketers got it right this time, and there’s something to be learned for integrators and consultants. Your clients want insights that will enable their people to take definitive, meaningful action – not just a bunch of insights, because a bunch of insights will just give you brain rot.
