The Problem With “Actionable”

Hi there,

Today we are going after a word that is everywhere in tech marketing right now, and almost never doing anything.

Actionable.

Actionable insights. Actionable takeaways. Actionable strategies. Actionable advice.

Let’s get to it.

Open any analytics platform, health tech company, or homepage right now. Here is what you will find:

• “Turn your data into actionable insights.”
• “Actionable insights for your sales team.”
• “Get actionable insights from your customer data.”
• “Delivering actionable insights to help you grow.”
• “From raw data to actionable insights, faster.”

IBM says it. Salesforce says it. The seed-stage startup with twelve customers says it. The health tech company tracking your sleep says it.

Every single one of them is saying the same thing, which means none of them are saying anything.

(We will get to “insights” in a future issue. That word has its own problems.)

Here is a quick test.

Take any sentence that uses “actionable” and remove it. Does the meaning change?

“Turn your data into actionable insights.” → “Turn your data into insights.”

No difference.

Nobody is out here trying to give you unactionable insights. Insights you cannot act on. Data that leads nowhere. The word is not describing anything real. It is just signaling that you want to be seen as useful, which is exactly what a company that is not being useful would do.

There is a version of this you probably recognize. When someone introduces themselves by saying “I am a good leader,” it usually means the opposite is true. Good leaders do not have to say it. The work says it for them. The same logic applies here. If your product actually delivers something useful, “actionable” never needs to show up.

This is what linguists call semantic bleaching. A word gets used so broadly and so often that it drains of meaning. It does not disappear, but becomes AI noise. “Innovative” went first. Then “strategic.” Then “disruptive.” Actionable is in the same place now. Your brain glosses right over it, and so does your buyer’s.

AI has pushed this one further and faster than most. The models are extremely good at producing language that performs usefulness without requiring any. “Actionable insights” is close to perfect output. It sounds like value and requires zero specificity. So it gets used, copied, pasted across a hundred homepages, and eventually it stops doing any work at all.

So what actually works?

Specificity.

“Your starting running back has shown a 12 percent decline in acceleration over the last three practices. That pattern has preceded a soft tissue injury in 75 percent of similar athletes within ten days.”

That is an insight. And it is actionable. You did not need to say either word. The specificity did the job.

That is the whole game. If your product makes a specific thing happen for a specific person at a specific moment, describe that. Name the decision it enables, what changes, and what your user does next. That is what “actionable” was always supposed to mean, and it is far more convincing than the word ever was.

The next time you go to write “actionable insights” on a homepage, a deck, or a one-pager, stop. Ask what the insight actually is. Ask what the action actually looks like. Write that instead.

If you cannot answer those questions, you do not have a copywriting problem. You have a positioning problem. And “actionable” is just the word you reach for when you are not ready to answer it yet.

Cut it. Do the work.

Yours in marketing, Jeff