I had a meeting yesterday morning with AMI Software, creators of a rather interesting Enterprise Intelligence / predictive intelligence software suite.

Without going too deep into the mechanics of how the product works, its functionality includes:
1. Information collection (via RSS, page indexing, document 'indexing') across internal sources and external Web sources (subscription based as well as free sites, aggregators, blogs, news services and so on).
2. The ability to 'understand' documents and rather interestingly to support comparisons in 'meaning' between two different sources (an interesting one in terms of plagiarism detection)

What might you use it for? Well, essentially anything that is enriched by the provision of any forward intelligence. Some that immediately spring to mind:

1. You could bolt on the semantic search capability in front of a traditional document management solution with a potential improvement in overall search utility
2. Web Intelligence screams reputation protection especially for large brands engaged in Social Media Marketing. I also like the potential to scan for information and IPR leakage
3. Horizon scanning - trend spotting, searching for weak signals, finding emerging patterns ahead of the competition
4. Competitor analysis
5. Collation of knowledge bases, a good example being in medical research
6. Plagiarism detection
7. 'Finger on the pulse' polling - e.g. customer feedback, political sentiment
8. Improving bidding processes through competitor analysis, quickly understanding sector issues and researching key stakeholders in the procurement process

In terms of alternatives, configuring a feed reader, or doing something with mashups might get you part of the way, but the major issue of finding quality information that you didn't necessarily understand was there (the proverbial needle in the haystack) is not facilitated. Using nifty search technology and AI (neural nets) below the bonnet, AMI provides much much deeper layers of post-collection intelligence in terms of presentation of content to the searcher. You could certainly argue that procuring bespoke reports from one of the big tech analyst companies would be viable, but this might not extend across every sector in the way individual companies would either require or could afford.

I like the idea of augmenting the system with an internal voting mechanism, where wisdom of crowds could feedback into training of the respective algorithms.

Interesting product, I definitely recommend reading more details on the AMI site and kicking the tyres to see where this might be of use...