Every cycle produces a metric that goes from niche to unavoidable. This cycle, inside insights, that metric is market signals. The companies that got ahead of it are now several quarters into compounding the advantage.
The clearest signal comes from mid-sized companies rather than the largest players. With smaller balance sheets and less room for error, they have been forced to get precise about market signals faster than incumbents who can absorb inefficiency for longer. Several founders described the same sequence: an early manual tracking effort, a period of resistance from teams used to older reporting cadences, and then a fairly abrupt switch once the first quarter of clean data proved the case internally.
Surveyed operators put the current adoption rate at just under half of mid-sized companies, up from roughly a quarter two years ago.
For now, the practical takeaway for operators is straightforward: treat market signals as a first-class metric with a named owner, not a shared responsibility that quietly belongs to no one.