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Mike Dwyer, founder and managing partner at Guardian Jet, learned a valuable lesson 25 years ago. Dwyer, who was Gulfstream's regional sales manager in New York before he founded Guardian Jet, walked into a hedge fund office trying to make a sale. The meeting lasted five minutes, because his prospect knew more about the market than he did. He walked out, "tail between my legs" along with an epiphany: it was all about the data.Dwyer went home and created an Excel spreadsheet that served as the foundation of the way Guardian Jet crunches numbers today."What percentage [of the fleet] is for sale? How do I calculate, like an appraiser would do, what's the fair market value for the airplane, track sales to see … if the market's trading in a premium or a discount."The evolution of that moment continued. About 15 years ago, Guardian turned multiple spreadsheets into a true database. And on Oct. 19, just in time for NBAA-BACE, Guardian Jet introduced Guardian Intelligence. The platform ties the firm's data, custom technology and advisory work together, and clients get it through the firm's portal, The Vault, at no additional cost.The newest advancement is a rebuilt Dynamic Market Survey. Guardian Jet says clients can search the aircraft it tracks across the industry on demand, filter by model year, airframe total time, asking price, equipment and location, and pull up aircraft for sale, recent sales, valuations, market movement and individual aircraft details.Vault users used to get a PDF report. Now they get a dynamic page with alerts for sold aircraft, new listings, and price changes. "Very Zillow-like," according to Dwyer.An AI feature called Market Insights summarizes patterns in the proprietary data and flags them for review with an advisor, who supplies the context and judgment.Dwyer puts the data and the human take into perspective: "For 25 years we've been tracking … Now you take that great data, and we think we have some really unique perspectives on it … and you bring the transaction experience into the data set and the technology platform."Why it mattersThe use of AI technology is no longer novel. What sets a platform apart is the historical dataset and the human take, and that is what Guardian Jet is banking on. The numbers go a lot farther in a thin market. Repeating what he called one of the best sayings he's heard, Dwyer said "When you have one airplane, and that's what we have in a lot of attractive markets, you don't have a market."