Why Do Businesses Have Sophisticated Models For Media Investment But Rely On Spreadsheets For Far Bigger Customer Decisions?
Media optimisation has become an established analytical discipline. Customer management, with its much broader commercial scope and complex interactions, has not. Now that businesses have invested heavily in customer data infrastructure, why aren’t they building the models to make better decisions?
Why Ryanair Prime Failed: The Modelling Gap
Ryanair Prime launched in March 2025 and closed eight months later. It attracted 55,000 members who paid €4.4 million in subscription income and took more than €6 million in fare discounts. Prime did not fail because customers behaved unexpectedly. It worked exactly as it was designed to work, which is a different and more uncomfortable cautionary tale. The risk was visible in Ryanair’s own data before launch, and was either not modelled or not acted a upon.
Digital Twins and the Rise of Decision Intelligence
When NASA engineers faced problems during the Apollo missions, they could not simply experiment on a spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. Instead, they relied on corresponding systems on the ground to understand what was happening, evaluate potential responses and anticipate the consequences of different decisions before acting. The principle was simple but powerful: if you can create an accurate representation of a complex system, you can explore possible futures before making changes in the real world.