Let me describe a workflow that will be familiar to anyone who's worked on a corporate strategy, M&A, or market intelligence team.
Your organization subscribes to several market research providers. Each quarter, a report arrives — sometimes a hundred pages, sometimes three hundred. It's a PDF. It contains useful data: project lists, company profiles, market sizing estimates, technology comparisons. An analyst reads it, highlights relevant sections, and copies key figures into an internal presentation or spreadsheet. The presentation goes to leadership. A decision gets made — or deferred. The PDF goes into a shared folder, where it joins dozens of others that are never opened again.
Three months later, a new report arrives. The cycle repeats.
This is a multi-billion-dollar industry built on a delivery format designed for print. And it's failing the teams that depend on it.
What's actually wrong with reports
The problem isn't that reports contain bad information. Many market research firms employ excellent analysts who produce genuinely insightful work. The problem is the container.
A PDF is a static, opaque, single-use artifact. The data it contains is trapped in typeset pages. You can read it, but you can't query it. You can't filter a report's project list to show only projects in Southeast Asia with capacity above 100 MW. You can't merge this quarter's data with last quarter's to track changes over time.
And that re-keying step — where an analyst transcribes figures from a PDF into a spreadsheet — is where errors enter. Every team that relies on report-based intelligence maintains internal databases that are manually populated from external reports. Those databases are always slightly wrong, always slightly out of date.
The update cycle is structurally wrong
Reports are published on the provider's schedule — quarterly, semi-annually, annually. But markets don't move on that schedule. A hydrogen project that was "in development" when the Q3 report was written may have reached FID, been delayed, or been cancelled by the time you read the report in Q4.
The alternative isn't "faster reports." It's continuously updated structured data that reflects the current state of the market, accessible whenever you need it.
Reports can't answer follow-up questions
Perhaps the most fundamental limitation: a report answers the questions the author anticipated. It doesn't answer yours.
With structured data, the question is a filter. Connect to the data through an API or a dashboard, set the parameters, and get the answer in seconds.
What structured data delivery looks like
The replacement for the PDF report isn't "the same content in a different format." It's a fundamentally different relationship between the intelligence provider and the client.
Instead of receiving a document on a schedule, you access continuously updated structured data through the interface that fits your workflow. A dashboard for visual exploration and monitoring. An API for integration into your own systems. An AI assistant for natural-language queries.
The transition is happening
We see this shift in every sector we cover. Strategy teams that used to subscribe to three or four report providers are asking us whether they can replace one or more subscriptions with structured data access.
The teams that will have an advantage over the next few years are those that move from report-based intelligence to data-based intelligence. Not because reports are worthless, but because structured data lets you ask the questions the report author didn't anticipate — and get current answers when you need them, not when the next edition is published.