Forestreet is a dichotomy and a juxtaposition in that it is a relatively new entrant to the ProcureTechSphere, as it only launched its platform in late 2022, but a relatively old company as it was founded in 2017 to super power supplier and market research for sourcing and category management professionals.

Like many recent supplier discovery startups (which have been quickly stood up on third party Gen AI, and which could fall just as quickly), as well as category management consultancies, the founders realized almost a decade ago that one of the things that was really holding sourcing professionals back was a lack of market knowledge when they had to source a new category, replace a supplier, or understand the market impact of a regulation or incident and set out to build a platform to make that happen (not knowing how much effort would be required to do it right). This is especially true when the sourcing and category management professionals are being constantly bombarded with marketing spiel and no real product or service insights.

This is the product they have been working on for the past eight years. An advanced technology platform that scours the web, in near real time, and brings back all of the information a human needs to make a good decision on category selection for a market event based on the current supplier landscape, supplier selection for inclusion in a market event, and even basic market entry based upon current market and supplier information.

It works extremely well and enables a human to do the research that used to take them weeks in a couple of hours and make good, market informed, decisions while finding suppliers and insights they never would have otherwise. Moreover, since the foundations were developed pre Gen-AI, the core is built on solid, tried-and-true, hallucination-free, technology that includes traditional AI and machine learning, a deep knowledge graph, and verifier technology (as it does use Gen-AI to identify potentially relevant sites, articles and sources, but then verifies every site, article, and source returned is valid and parses the content using tried-and-true tech for better indexing and cross-correlation [based on the knowledge graph]). The founders, who believe that AI is the most overused and most misused term in technology (and it is), know that the path to success depends on identifying the right advanced technology (or algorithm) for each problem encountered, the right technology may or may not be AI, and it’s ultimately not about the technology but the solution it enables. They know that a sourcing professional needs to have a research superpower and their goal is to give you one, using whatever technology is appropriate. (You shouldn’t care about “AI”. You should care about results!)

Let’s talk about the main part of the application today, and what improvements (currently in development/alpha) are slated for next quarter. (More great things will likely materialize later in the year, but SI only covers what it has seen).

Market Explorer (Today)

Market explorer is designed to give you enough domain expertise in 30 to 120 minutes, depending on how deep you need to go, to identify if there is a market (opportunity), who the main suppliers are, and what the primary issues are that you need to be aware of. To start, all you need to do is either provide a sample company (website) or define a category and a geography. In the first case, if you provide a sample company (website URL), it will identify the potential markets and geographies and allow you to refine your search criteria to industry (s) (roles), locations, and keywords, all of which will have auto-suggestions but all of which can be overridden. In the second case, you just define the category by keywords and, optionally, provide a geography of interest.

Once you confirm your market, it will go off and scour the web and in three to five minutes bring back all of the companies it can find with profiles on each. It will preload at least the first page of each website, and pre-load additional pages as soon as you access the supplier so you can click through the supplier’s site through the Forestreet platform. You can then select each supplier of interest, and then it will alter its market intelligence overview of the market accordingly based on your selection. The tool is designed to allow you to quickly scan through 60 to 80 suppliers in 20 minutes, build a reasonable starting set (for further research), and quickly hone in on the right market and supply base. Once that is done, depending on the complexity, it will take the user 30 minutes to a few hours to identify the right pool of suppliers for an RFP or the right elements for a customized market intelligence report to the C-Suite. (This effort, when you think about the amount of time these tasks take now, is nothing. Your effort has been reduced by weeks to part of a morning or afternoon.)

Currently, the market intelligence overview gives you a market size estimate, top company list, company segmentation by revenue range, geographic distribution, mosaic breakdown by primary offering, feature map, emerging topic list, related news and ESG overview (with correlated ESG articles indexed separately). From the overview, you can click into a feature analysis, explore phrases relative to the market, dive into the news archive or the ESG view, or dive into a profile of each returned supplier.

Forestreet built their own custom ESG model across 25 sub-categories and scores the market (and, if possible, each supplier) across that model, using available data and sentiment (that is often the best generic score you can find). In the ESG view, you see the average positive or negative for each major score, the relevant articles, and can dive into individual factors and sources and company groups.

With regards to the company profiles the system builds for you, it pulls back basic profile data like name, location, contact information, revenue, market bracket, a brief overview, and a momentum score against the market based on market overage. It will also pull legal information and identifiers (incorporation dates, status, key personnel, etc.), a summary of key features and services, associated news and events (that contribute to the larger market archive), the ESG rating and a listing of its primary competitors based on the market data.

In addition, it can output the entire market report, or just selected portions, to a PDF presentation for your management presentation.

And, if after the first pass you want to dive into a subset of the market, alter the criteria, and/or retrieve more information on a subset of suppliers, you can make the necessary alterations to your request, run it again, and in another 15 to 20 minutes you’ll have more refined information. Many professionals get what they need after the second try, and if not, it’s the same 15 to 20 minutes to run it a third time. Even the most complicated market research questions are usually sufficiently answered within 3 tries and 2 hours. Considering that a human doing the research manually would, before the introduction of Forestreet, have to spend weeks to compile everything that the Forestreet platform does in minutes, it is a phenomenal tool that enables superhuman performance and a pure focus on the strategic value-add work a skilled professional should be doing, not the manual Google searching or, even worse, the validation of each Gen-AI output because you know many of the results will be useless and and some, sadly, made up!

Market Intelligence (Tomorrow, well, Q2 actually)

Right now, the market intelligence product is quite good, and actually industry leading in many respects, but they know you need more, they are working on more (and SI has seen the development alpha, beta customers will have access by early Q2, product is expected to launch by late Q2), and what’s coming will be even better. You will be able to do the work of expert consultants on your own in a few hours for most markets. Here’s a brief overview of what’s to come (and it looks great).

• Deeper Market Data for a Market Landscape including
  • trends and innovations: the next version of the platform will not just identify emerging topics, but overall market trends and innovations with descriptions of each
  • financial predictions: is the market growing, static, or declining in size
  • ESG themes and [emerging] challenges: what is the bulk of the activity and content centered around, why, and what are the challenges; not just the E in ESG, but for example carbon capture in plant emissions, etc.
• Deeper Market Analysis including:
  • feature distribution: not just feature maps, but distributions and a deeper analysis thereon
  • topic analysis: deeper dive into topics and related features, ESG criteria, etc.
  • market distributions: dive into a region, feature subset, etc. and have detailed data all the way down like you would in a modern spend analysis system that rolls up an n level category from the transaction level to the global spend view and lets a user drill all the way down
• Broader Vendor Profiles: there’s a lot planned here, but most of this hasn’t hit full alpha, so we’re not going to discuss it in detail (as it’s unclear what will hit the coming beta and how well it will work), and if they get even half of it production ready, trust me in that you will be amazed (and hopefully throw your Gen-AI chatbot in the virtual trashbin where it belongs)

It will be very easy to walk through the analysis step by step in the next version and, of course, output it, or just sections of it, to a Powerpoint for your presentation. You will be able to walkthrough at least (working alpha):

• Summary Overview
• ESG
• Risk and Challenges
• Cost and Price Drivers
• Market Size
• Acquisitions and Mergers
• New Products and Services
• Innovations and Opportunities
• Trends
• Regulations and Consequences
• New Suppliers
• Growth Projections
• Key Players … and, of course, deep dive into any company, which will have all of the information available in the current release, a deeper capability overview, a SWOT analysis, and hopefully, a few other pleasant surprises by the end of next quarter

If you haven’t heard of Forestreet, well, you have now, and if you don’t have a tool like that in your arsenal and you have tens of millions in strategic spend, you should … and have no reason NOT to check them out. You know that the doctor is an expert in advanced tech and constantly rails against most of the AI BS that has hit the market over the last few years (and ruined the good name of the great AI tech that came before, which was supposed to give you all the innovations chronicled in these two series on The Complete AI in Procurement, Sourcing, and Supplier Management, but just gave you gibberish that told you to eat one rock a day). This should tell you that if he’s finally saying “there’s something there, and it’s pretty damn good” then there is something there, it’s pretty damn good, and you probably shouldn’t be without a tool like this if you’re spending tens (if not hundreds) of millions on strategic spend categories.

Thus, if you don’t have a tool like Forestreet (and the doctor knows you don’t), check them out. While he’s sure there are exceptions it won’t work for, Forestreet have been building their knowledge graph (real AI tech) for 8 years and it’s broad and deep enough that it will work for the majority of companies. Moreover, even if it only gets you 80% to 90% of the way there, and you still have to do a bit of manual digging into key issues or topics or potential suppliers, it’s still saving you weeks of work. That’s what counts as it allows you to focus your Human Intelligence (and potential) on what matters, not the drudgery of getting to that point.