Written by Will Jones
Ed Lewis has spent more than four decades as a leader in the industrial market intelligence industry, growing the global market intelligence company he founded. His approach is grounded in a principle that has become increasingly important in the age of artificial intelligence: Business intelligence is only as valuable as the information behind it.
Headquartered in Sugar Land, Texas, Lewis’s company, Industrial Info Resources, provides market intelligence across the energy, power, oil and gas, chemical, and heavy industrial sectors. The company tracks industrial plants, capital projects, equipment, outages, and other market activity worldwide, with its intelligence grounded in primary research and direct human verification.
Lewis has championed that research philosophy since founding IIR in 1983. Now, he is pairing it with emerging AI technology to address one of the most pressing challenges facing businesses today: not only getting information faster, but knowing whether it can be trusted.
IIR recently launched IIR Envoy™ MCP, a Model Context Protocol server that connects the company's human-verified industrial intelligence directly to AI platforms. The innovation is central to what Lewis believes is the next evolution of how businesses interact with information, a period he calls the “Answer Age.”
“I’ve been trying to get to the answer age for 20 years,” Lewis recently said during a podcast conversation. “And really, what’s been a stumbling block is really having the right technology to be able to deliver that answer. And now we have that technology.”
Leading Industry Into the Answer Age
The Information Age gave businesses unprecedented access to data. The Knowledge Age introduced increasingly sophisticated ways to organize and interpret it. Lewis believes AI is now pushing businesses toward an environment where professionals expect to ask complex questions and receive useful answers almost instantly.The challenge is determining whether those answers are reliable enough to act on. “It’s not a question of if someone can get an answer; it’s a question of whether the quality and validity of the answer is good enough to base major business decisions on,” Lewis said.
IIR Envoy MCP was created with that challenge in mind. It gives authorized AI assistants structured access to IIR intelligence covering capital projects, plants, industrial equipment, offline events, companies, ownership, and activity across markets and geographies. Users can ask questions in natural language and receive answers drawn from IIR’s live industrial data.
For industries where decisions can involve major capital investments, operational disruptions, supply chains, and changing market conditions, the quality of that underlying intelligence can be critical.
Combining Human Intelligence With AI
Lewis’ approach to AI is rooted in the same methodology he used to build IIR. “When I started the company, I decided to only deliver information that was phone verified and continuously updated,” Lewis said. “Trusted Data’s been here for a long time.”While AI can rapidly process and present information, Lewis believes human verification remains essential. IIR researchers contact plants directly as part of the company's primary research process, providing an alternative to intelligence based solely on information scraped or inferred from online sources.
“It always starts with the human, with us,” Lewis said. “We’re not trying to alleviate the human element. It absolutely has to stay in the process.” Rather than using AI to replace the research infrastructure IIR has spent decades building, Lewis is using the technology to make that intelligence more accessible inside the tools businesses increasingly rely on. That distinction reflects the long view Lewis has taken throughout his leadership of IIR. The technology may change, but the need for credible information does not. “The key differentiator for us is because our MCP is based on trusted data, period,” Lewis said.
As sophisticated AI becomes available to more organizations, Lewis believes the conversation will increasingly shift from what AI can do to what information businesses are willing to trust it with. For Industrial Info Resources, that creates an opportunity to bring more than 40 years of human-verified intelligence into an entirely new technological environment. And for Lewis, it brings an idea he has pursued for decades closer to reality.
With the Answer Age upon us, he believes the defining question is no longer whether technology can produce an answer. It is: “How good is the answer?”
