General-Purpose AI Struggles with Competitive Intelligence
Why It Matters, and What to Do Instead!
Generative AI can summarize, rephrase, and repackage existing content with impressive fluency. But it has a fatal flaw in high-stakes decision environments like Competitive Intelligence (CI): it reflects the quality and ambiguity of its inputs. As the old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Except now it looks smart.
If you’ve ever asked a general-purpose AI tool to compare vendors, explain a market shift, or summarize a competitive threat, you’ve likely encountered one or more of the following:
- Inconsistent answers depending on phrasing
- Missing or outdated references
- Fabricated citations or source attributions
- Unverifiable summaries of proprietary vendor material
These aren’t just minor flaws. They’re red flags. In CI, consistency, accuracy, and attribution aren’t optional; they’re mission-critical. That’s why The Aquarium was built differently.
The Case for Curation: The Lionfish Aquarium
The Lionfish Aquarium isn’t a collection of random internet data and scraped reviews. It’s curated by veteran Advisors with hundreds of years of combined experience across verticals. Its data inputs are:
- Cleaned, normalized, and cross-validated
- Drawn from current pricing, contract terms, M&A activity, analyst briefings, and RFP responses
- Scored and ranked using transparent methodologies
And most importantly, every insight is traceable. Clients can drill down into why a vendor ranks where it does – not just take the answers on faith.
Multiple 2025 reports echo these concerns:
- 48% Error Rate: AI Hallucinations Rise in 2025 Reasoning Systems – Techopedia highlights how newer reasoning models from OpenAI and others are producing more hallucinations than their predecessors.
- AI’s Hallucination Problem Isn’t Going Away – Forbes reports hallucination rates in models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini reaching up to 50%, with no clear explanation for the spike.
- AI is Getting Smarter, but Hallucinations Are Getting Worse – IEEE ComSoc’s blog reviews the PHARE benchmark, showing persistent hallucination rates even as language model sophistication improves.
Why This Matters To You
In high-stakes strategy work, speed is only helpful if it’s accurate. The Lionfish Aquarium doesn’t guess faster. It knows better.
General-purpose AI has a role in drafting language, summarizing context, and translating jargon – but it should never be your source of truth for competitive positioning. That’s where curated intelligence, built on context, human expertise, and transparency, earns its keep.
Because in CI, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you. And what you think you know – when it's hallucinated – can be even worse.
Choose curation. Choose clarity. Choose the Lionfish Aquarium.
About Lionfish
Lionfish Tech Advisors bring hundreds of years of collective global IT Advisor experience together to help companies realize their full potential. Every member is a recognized thought leader who has conducted extensive market readiness and performance studies of companies small and large across the globe. Our advisors help vendors maximize profits, expand their customer base, secure competitive advantage, and foster investor relations. We are your Trusted IT Growth Partners.
For more information, please visit https://www.lionfishtechadvisors.com/