Dror Poleg’s Data Dashboard

The Corporate Buzzword League

By Dror Poleg

This chart ranks nine tracked phrases by their share of searchable SEC 10-K filings, year by year over the last fifteen years - a league table of corporate buzzwords. Artificial intelligence climbs to first place and stays; Blockchain falls through the table; ESG rises, peaks, and slips. Because rank hides magnitude, hovering any point reveals the phrase's actual share of filings that year.

Latest observation: 2025·Expected cadence: Annual
BusinessAI
What does it show?

Every buzzword eventually falls down the table — Artificial intelligence hasn't yet. Blockchain slid from the top ranks toward the bottom; ESG rose, peaked, and is slipping. Tooltips carry each phrase's actual filing share.

Methodology

For each tracked phrase, the share of searchable SEC 10-K filings with an exact-phrase match, from the deployed corporate-buzzword-cycle instrument, converted to a per-year rank among the nine tracked phrases over the last fifteen years. Rank hides magnitude by design — a #1 at 9% of filings and a #1 at 2% look identical — so each point carries the underlying share, shown in tooltips. The phrase list is a fixed editorial basket, not a scan of all corporate language.

Sources