By: Iwalola Sobowale (LinkedIn profile)
There is a question I ask at the start of almost every advisory engagement, and it tends to produce a very uncomfortable silence: when did customer intelligence last change a decision that had already been made internally? In my experience, the silence is not because the answer is hard to find. It is because the honest answer is rarely flattering.
Most organisations I have worked with believe they are data-driven. In my view, what they actually are is data-collecting, and the difference matters enormously. Data-collecting organisations invest in research, commission studies, track their Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), and run customer interviews. What distinguishes data-driven organisations is that they have built the infrastructure that ensures all of that effort actually changes what happens next. The first is a function. The second is a system. And in my observation, a striking number of organisations have built the function while entirely neglecting the system.
Let’s examine why this gap persists and why it is becoming more expensive to ignore: the problem is not cultural, and it is not technological. It is, instead, structural. Between the moment a customer tells an organisation something important and the moment a decision-maker acts on it, there are at least five places the signal can die: it can be captured through the wrong channels, it can sit unanalysed in a shared drive, it can be synthesised too slowly to be relevant, it can fail to reach the person who needed it, or it can be overridden by a leader who trusted their instinct more than the evidence. I would argue that most organisations are losing customer intelligence at two or three of these points simultaneously, without realising it.
This challenge is becoming even more urgent to fix because artificial intelligence has introduced a complication that I do not think enough leaders are discussing. Organisations are currently investing heavily in AI-powered data tools, and the promise is compelling. But in my experience, AI does not fix broken intelligence infrastructure; it simply amplifies it. If the underlying system for capturing, synthesising, routing, and preserving customer intelligence is weak, AI will produce faster, more confident, and more expensive wrong answers. The architecture has to exist before the technology can serve it.
There is also another element of this problem that I have come to call “Knowledge Debt”: the accumulated cost of institutional memory stored in people rather than systems. Every time a researcher or business leader leaves, a team is reorganised, or a new product cycle begins, organisations have to re-learn what they already paid to discover. In my experience, this is one of the most expensive and least discussed inefficiencies in product organisations today.
These are the challenges I have been building solutions for across 10+ years of research and product strategy work, and they are the subject of my forthcoming book titled: “Precision: How to Build Your Organisation’s Intelligence Operating System”. If the question that animates Precision is how organisations learn from their users, the question I explore in my co-authored first book, Designing Usable Products for African Users: The African Usability Bible (Taylor & Francis, October 2026), is whether the products those organisations build were ever designed with their users in mind. In my view, both conversations matter urgently, and neither question can be answered well without the other, even if each deserves its own book.
About the Author
Iwalola Sobowale is Director of Research, owning product innovation and business strategy at Moniepoint Group and Founder of IFS Insights and Usability for Africa. She is co-author of “Designing Usable Products for African Users: The African Usability Bible” (Taylor & Francis, October 2026) and author of the forthcoming “Precision: How to Build Your Organisation’s Intelligence Operating System.”
She was a speaker at ESOMAR Africa in Focus 2026 and World Usability Day Africa 2024 and writes for a number of blogs, including her newsletter, ‘The Spotlight’.
