You too can play the Magic Quadrant game!

When a large company is looking for solutions for a particular functional area, such as supply chain planning solutions, it often refers to analyst benchmarks to identify a list of potential players—an approach that has been popularized under the term "Magic Quadrant."

How this benchmark is actually carried out, which solutions are included, and why one player is considered a "Leader" and another a "Visionary" is not entirely clear—but rest assured, it is undoubtedly the work of seasoned analysts who have studied the capabilities of the solutions on the market in detail to judge which ones you should consider for your own company.

If we are going to trust an opaque approach to aggregating and ranking solutions according to given criteria, why not ask artificial intelligence?

I decided to experiment with our friend of the day, Gemini.

I asked it to identify the top solutions for "Supply Chain Planning." It's cool, I see Intuiflow there, which strangely doesn't appear in other quadrants...

The quadrant above is interactive—you can navigate to see an overview of each solution and compare their strengths. Okay, let's be honest, these are the supposed strengths of these solutions—it's probably a compilation of marketing claims available online—I don't think Gemini went out and interviewed practitioners using each of these solutions in their real-life businesses.

What if, instead of comparing solutions based on "completeness of vision" and "ability to execute," I explored criteria that matter more to my business: "speed of implementation" vs. "completeness of offering."

That's interesting, I'll have to explore other axes.

But there's another criterion I'd like to evaluate. I've heard that some solutions on the market are very (very) expensive, and I don't have millions to invest. Gemini, can you offer me a filter based on the budgets I need to plan for?

Ah, yes, there are indeed solutions that are beyond my budget. Well, we're not going to name names here, we'll blur the names—but curiously, they are mostly players at the top right...

Let's look at another experiment—I know that Intuiflow is a supply chain solution, but I believe it's also a recognized scheduling solution—how does it compare with other scheduling and execution solutions?

Ah, that's not bad—I can have a leading, affordable supply chain solution that also compares favorably with the best players for scheduling complex production flows?

AI is transforming market research

So, in just one hour, sitting alone at my desk, I've conducted my market research, and I can refine it according to my criteria and explore several avenues. This is undoubtedly cause for concern for some consulting firms and analysts.

What methodology is behind these rankings? For sure, it's opaque. I don't know if I can really trust Gemini. But my feeling is that it is no more biased than other peremptory rankings that may be influenced by economic interests—and the ability to refine the selection of potential players according to my own criteria is a real plus.

Feel free to try it out for yourself with your favorite LLM... and then apply your critical thinking skills!