The problem isn't PR data, it's interpretation: Cision's Winston D'Souza on how to fix it

Every large Indian organisation I've walked into in the last fifteen years has the same story to tell, just with different tech stacks attached.

Three, four, sometimes five teams, all watching the same market, all producing their own version of “what's happening out there” and rarely the same version. It reminds me of the analogy of the classic parable of the blind men and the elephant.

This isn't a technology problem. Having worked with over 2,000 organisations across categories, I can say with some confidence that the platforms available to Indian brands today – global and local – are good enough. What's missing isn't the tech stack. It's the person who knows how to ask it the right question, and the system that turns the answer into something a leadership team can act on.

Here's the pattern I keep seeing: a platform gets deployed, an internal team gets trained on it, and the organisation quietly assumes intelligence will follow. It rarely does. Reading a dashboard and understanding a market are two different skills, and most teams were hired for the former, not the latter. What you end up with is a lot of data and very little judgement – sentiment scores without context, mention volumes without meaning, alerts nobody has time to interpret.

And even where interpretation does happen, it happens in silos. Marketing builds its own picture. Comms builds another. Content teams work off a third, often disconnected from what search behaviour is actually telling them. Each function reports up independently, sometimes on different days, each one quietly convinced its slice of the story is the most important one. Leadership ends up stitching together fragments instead of reading one coherent narrative.

That's the real cost of the current model. Not bad data. Fragmented sense-making.

A different starting point

The best data doesn't decide for a leader. It gives them the confidence to make the bold call. That's a useful test to apply to almost anything an organisation currently calls “intelligence” – does it inform a decision, or does it just report a number?

The fix, I'd argue, isn't another dashboard or another platform. It's a shift from a multi-silo, mixed-signal model to a top-down one: a single, consolidated knowledge pack that leadership receives, understands, and then cascades down through the organisation, rather than five different versions climbing up and colliding at the top.

Think of it as a three-part architecture.

One, intelligence. Continuous monitoring of brand and category health across social, news, competitors and audience conversations is table stakes now – every platform does this. The value comes from trained analysts working alongside proprietary AI models to decide what actually matters, why it matters, and what's shifting under the surface. Signal, not noise.

Two, sense-making into communication. Raw intelligence has to be converted into something a comms or marketing team can use – narratives worth addressing, content territories worth owning, the actual questions audiences are asking, the gaps in what's already been said, the issues starting to brew before they become headlines. This is the translation layer most organisations skip, and it's the one that matters most.

Three, AI-native content and distribution. This is where the ground has genuinely shifted. Consumers aren't only searching on Google anymore – they're asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude to answer questions for them directly. That changes what content needs to look like. It has to be built around user intent, structured around the five Ws and the one H, written for clear takeaways and answerability, sourced with enough authority and context that a generative engine trusts it enough to surface it. Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation aren't buzzwords for a future cycle – they're already reshaping how leading brands globally structure what they publish. Indian organisations will need to catch up quickly.

The moat is the loop

None of these three parts is particularly novel on its own. Plenty of agencies do monitoring. Plenty do content. What's rare is the loop that connects them: observe, interpret, recommend, create, distribute, and observe again. Most organisations do the first and last step reasonably well and have almost nothing built for the middle three.

Put simply, the market today is fragmented into five separate asks – tell me what's being said, help me manage and publish it, tell me what it means, turn strategy into content, get the content out – usually answered by multiple vendors who don't talk to each other. The opportunity isn't to be the sixth vendor. It's to be the one that closes the loop.

Because the scarce resource in Indian marketing and communications right now isn't data. Every brand has more of it than it knows what to do with. What's scarce is interpretation – the ability to sit inside all that noise and tell a CEO, with confidence, what it means and what to do next.

That's the shift worth making. Not more dashboards. One knowledge pack, one shared truth, cascading down instead of colliding at the top.

By Winston D’Souza, business head, Cision, India