"Blocked" customers aren't using a bad alternative; they're doing nothing because no viable solution exists. You can't observe their struggle. Unlocking this latent demand, as Uber did for people who previously wouldn't travel, doesn't just steal market share—it creates a new market entirely.

The conversation around Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) has evolved beyond simple refinement. With newly accessible data, companies are fundamentally re-evaluating their Total Addressable Market (TAM), challenging long-held assumptions about who their potential customers are and how big the opportunity is.

AI can be a powerful fraud detection tool by comparing a company's public statements against alternative data. For example, it can analyze satellite imagery of shipping traffic or factory activity and flag discrepancies with management's guidance.

Amid a culture of hackathons and demos, Samsara prioritizes AI projects by focusing on concrete customer problems. The ultimate filter isn't technical novelty but whether the solution creates enough operational leverage that a customer would pay for it, grounding R&D in business value.

Many founders operate on flawed assumptions about how they acquire customers. Analyzing marketing data often shatters these myths, revealing that sales and traffic come from unexpected sources. This discovery points to untapped growth opportunities and where marketing energy is best spent.

Companies controlling proprietary data, even if publicly accessible but hard to collect (like FlightAware), can use AI to deliver a 'finished meal' instead of just the 'raw vegetables.' This moves them up the value chain from a data provider to a solutions provider, unlocking significant pricing power.

Standard navigation apps like Google Maps can lead commercial trucks into disastrous situations, such as colliding with low bridges. Samsara built a specialized tool that accounts for vehicle dimensions, road restrictions, and even company-specific rules to ensure safety and compliance.

Instead of traditional market research tools, scrape Google Maps data. Analyze business listings, review volume, and sentiment to find niches with high customer demand but low satisfaction, signaling a clear market gap for a new or improved service.

The next frontier of data isn't just accessing existing databases, but creating new ones with AI. Companies are analyzing unstructured sources in creative ways—like using computer vision on satellite images to count cars in parking lots as a proxy for employee headcounts—to answer business questions that were previously impossible to solve.