At the Info-Tech Live conference, I moderated a session for analyst relations (AR) and marketing professionals with two Info-Tech Research Group analysts: John Annand, Principal Research Director for Infrastructure and Operations, and Igor Ikonnikov, Advisory Fellow in Data and Analytics. The room was full of people whose job is to get their company in front of analysts like these. I put one question to John and Igor and then opened the floor.
Here's why that question matters. Info-Tech runs over 400 analysts and executive counselors who field more than 75,000 advisory calls a year from member organizations. Every one of those calls is a moment where an analyst might be asked about your product, your category, or your competitor. The briefing is the only structured opportunity you get to influence what that analyst says when your name comes up.
Most vendors burn that opportunity on a sales pitch with the prospect removed. John and Igor spent the session explaining, in specific and sometimes uncomfortable terms, why that doesn't work and what does.
Give the analyst a person, not a deck
John Annand's answer was immediate: he needs a point of contact who can orient him inside the product, not a presenter. Analysts already read the press releases and follow the trade coverage. What they can't get anywhere else is someone who will sit down and actually engage with the question they walked in with.
He described the difference bluntly. A briefing that just recaps material he could have read beforehand wastes his time, and his time before a briefing is not idle. He does the homework. He shows up wanting an interactive session, and what he doesn't want is a spokesperson reciting safe, rehearsed lines, the kind of answer he called "a politician's sound bite."
John framed it from his members' perspective too. When an IT leader calls Info-Tech with a problem, they're not asking for a product category, they're asking how to solve something specific. If the person across the table in a briefing can only speak to the product as a category rather than as a solution to that kind of problem, the briefing doesn't translate into anything John can use.
The practical implication: send the person who can take a question off the rails. If your subject matter expert can only deliver the deck, send someone else too, and brief both of them on what the analyst actually covers.
Honesty about gaps builds more trust than confidence about strengths
Igor Ikonnikov's framing was the sharpest moment of the session. Analysts are not sales prospects. CIOs trust Info-Tech's advice, which means the advice an analyst gives is only as good as the information a vendor gave that analyst. If your product has a gap, say so, up front, and tell the analyst whether you're closing it, working around it, or living with it as a tradeoff.
Igor told the room about a time a vendor gave him incorrect information during a briefing, and he later had to walk it back with the members he'd advised based on it. His message to vendors was direct: don't put an analyst in that position. It's bad for your product, bad for the relationship, and it's the kind of thing an analyst remembers the next time that vendor's name comes up.
The practical implication: if your briefing prep document includes a section on what not to bring up unless asked, that section is a liability. Analysts are trained to find the gap you didn't mention. Naming it yourself, with a plan attached, reads as command of the product. Getting caught hiding it reads as something an analyst will remember the next time your name comes up on one of those 75,000 calls.
This applies especially to executives in the room. If an analyst asks something outside your depth, it is fine to say you don't know and follow up afterward with the answer. That costs you nothing. Guessing, or having someone else in the room improvise an answer to cover for you, is what creates the kind of incorrect information Igor described.
An AI-only briefing is a briefing about nothing
This is the section every marketing leader prepping a 2026 briefing calendar should read twice. Igor was blunt: artificial intelligence (AI) is a means to an outcome, not a product category by itself, with one exception he noted in passing, a company whose entire identity is built on AI research itself. For everyone else, "here's our AI" is not a briefing topic. It's a sentence fragment.
He backed it with a story from an earlier hype cycle. When data lakes first took off, there were two major early players. One of them was, for a stretch, the fastest at processing data and the more prominent name in the category. That same company deprioritized governance and cataloging in the race for speed, and it doesn't exist as an independent company today. Igor's point: speed without the unglamorous capabilities that make speed usable doesn't survive contact with the market. He sees the same dynamic now in agentic AI platforms, where the sophisticated work isn't making a model fast, it's everything around the model.
John added the practical test analysts actually apply. Strip the word "AI" out of your pitch. If what's left still describes something real, a faster process, a cut in headcount needed for a task, a problem that used to take days and now takes hours, you have a briefing. If removing "AI" leaves you with nothing to say, you don't.
Both analysts flagged one more tell: what a vendor chooses not to say. A briefing heavy on funding totals, headcount, and company size, with thin product detail, reads as filling time because there isn't more to talk about. John was candid that repeated appeals to scale, without a connection to differentiation, often signal that growth came from acquisition rather than from building something distinct, and analysts will say so when asked.
Frequency matters less than what you do with the time
On cadence, John and Igor agreed quickly: quarterly is too frequent for most vendor relationships, and annual leaves too much of a gap, especially with how fast AI-driven product roadmaps are moving right now. Neither offered a single right number. Their actual point was that cadence should track how fast your product is genuinely changing, not an AR team's internal calendar built around fiscal quarters. A vendor shipping meaningful changes every six weeks and briefing annually is giving the analyst eleven months of stale information. A vendor with a slow-moving enterprise roadmap briefing quarterly is asking the analyst to sit through updates with nothing new in them.
The view from the other side of the table
I put a direct question to the room: do you run a briefing program, and what's it actually for? Beth Ambaruch, who leads analyst relations at Esri, answered first. For her team, briefings are a two-way street. Sharing product direction matters, but the feedback that comes back, the pitfalls an analyst flags, the pivot they suggest, goes straight to product management. It doesn't always change the roadmap, but it always shapes how the team understands the gap and how they message around it.
Robin Schaefer took the question of when a startup should stand up an AR program, and her answer cuts against the instinct to wait. Analysts aren't interested in incremental improvements on something the market already has. If a startup is doing something that could change how the category is structured, analysts want to know now, at whatever stage that company is at. Plenty of companies enter a market doing roughly the same thing as everyone else, slightly better, and that doesn't generate analyst interest no matter how mature the company gets. The trigger for AR isn't funding stage. It's whether you have something genuinely different to say.
Emma Jung closed the practical loop: if you want a briefing with Info-Tech, the firm has a vendor services team built for exactly that, and reaching out starts the process.
What to do Monday
Pull your last three analyst briefing decks. For each one, answer three questions honestly. Did you send someone who could field a question that went off the prepared track, or only someone who could deliver the deck? Did the deck name a real product gap, with a stated plan for it, or did it route around the weak spots? And if AI came up, did every mention survive the test of removing the word "AI" and still describing something real?
If any of those answers is no, that's not a deck problem. It's a who's-in-the-room problem, and it's the thing to fix before your next briefing, not after.