Why TAM SAM SOM matter more than ever to new, intelligent orgs

The real reason market sizing fails (it not a maths problem, it’s a meaning problem)

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting about TAM, you’ve probably seen this play out:

Marketing has one TAM. Product has another. Sales has a third. All insist theirs is “the real” one while Finance quietly creates a different version in the background.

Four teams. Four numbers. And all of them defend their spreadsheet as if they were gospel.

This happens because most organisations don’t have a shared logic layer — the schema and ontology that define what a customer actually is, what a segment actually means, or how markets should be structured. Without a shared vocabulary, TAM becomes a fantasy projection, SAM becomes an optimistic guess, and SOM becomes a compromise based on internal politics.

Meaning breaks before maths ever does

This is where traditional organisations fall apart and where Decidr’s ontology becomes essential. When market entities (industries, workflows, organisational sizes, pricing bands, capabilities and constraints) are structured as schema-driven objects, TAM, SAM and SOM stop being abstract concepts. They become grounded expressions of how your organisation understands itself and the world it operates in.

TAM, SAM and SOM map directly to how intelligent systems understand goals

Most companies treat TAM, SAM and SOM as external metrics: numbers about the market. But at their core, they’re three layers of scope and constraint. This aligns directly with how intelligent systems reason about goals.

• TAM (total addressable market) is the whole pie: everyone who could use your product if nothing stood in the way. No limits based on location, features, regulations or business model. It’s the biggest possible version of your market, the full opportunity. If you sell fitness apps, TAM is every person in the world who wants to get fitter.
• SAM (serviceable available market) is the slice of the pie you can actually serve with the product you have today. It’s shaped by your real world constraints i.e., your features, pricing, where you operate and what regulations apply. For example, if your fitness app only supports English and works on iPhone, SAM is the English-speaking iPhone users who want to get fitter.
• SOM (serviceable obtainable market) is the slice you can realistically win. It reflects your current resources, competition, marketing reach and operational capacity. If you’ve only launched in Australia and have a small marketing budget, SOM is the group of Australian iPhone users you can actually reach and convert right now.

This mirrors Decidr’s nested goal structure:

• Ambition (TAM): the system’s ultimate goal space.
• Capability (SAM): what the system is able to do today.
• Execution (SOM): what the system can deliver right now given real world conditions.

In other words, TAM/SAM/SOM are goal logic in disguise. See? And our chairman said talking about goals was too “woo-woo.” Pft!

This framing makes them far more than market metrics. They become part of the organisational intelligence model, a way for agentic apps to reason about which goals are desirable, feasible and achievable.

When your organisation becomes networked, TAM/SAM/SOM stop being static

Most companies calculate market size once a year (or once a decade), and those numbers remain trapped in PowerPoint. Nothing updates when:

• New features launch
• New industries unlock
• Regulations change
• Your product becomes cheaper to deliver
• Demand patterns shift
• Your team grows or shrinks
• Market signals evolve.

The world moves, but the numbers don’t.

A networked organisation behaves differently.

When your data, workflows, capabilities and behaviours all run through a unified schema — when your systems are genuinely orchestrated — TAM, SAM and SOM become living models (ok that bit was a tad woo-woo…).

As your internal attributes change (cost to serve, operational capacity, process automation levels, new app deployments), or as external signals shift (market demand, competitor movements, regulatory domains), your serviceable market recalculates itself.

TAM shows possibility.SAM shows capability.SOM shows reality.

All three evolve continuously as your organisation evolves.

This is the shift from static reporting to dynamic reasoning, and you can only achieve it once the organisation is networked.

TAM, SAM and SOM are schema problems disguised as strategy problems

Every strategy team in the world has lived this scenario:

“Which industries do we serve?”“Depends who you ask.”

“What does ‘mid-market’ mean?”“No two teams define it the same way.”

“Are freelancers customers or partners?”“Both? Or neither? Or it depends?”

When your entities aren’t defined in a structured way, you aren’t doing market sizing, you’re playing guessing games.

Once these entities are expressed inside a schema (industry types, business sizes, workflow attributes, product capabilities, pricing tiers, regulatory domains), the picture changes.

Suddenly, TAM, SAM and SOM aren’t strategy guesses, they are computable objects.

You can run:

• Segmentation analysis
• Reachability logic
• Capability mapping
• Regulatory filtering
• Pricing feasibility
• Product market alignment checks

And you can do it all in real time.

Not because you wrote a better strategy document, but because the underlying structure of the business became machine readable.

In other words: Market sizing becomes an expression of your schema quality.

Agentic apps make TAM/SAM/SOM self-maintaining, not human-maintained

Today, market sizing is treated as a once-off reporting task: mostly irrelevant the moment it is published.

And yet the most intelligent organisations aren’t static — they’re constantly shifting, automating, improving and expanding their capabilities.

An agentic system can monitor cost-to-serve changes, track product capability improvements, analyse new workflows brought online, detect new customer segments emerging, map regulatory shifts, reassess competitive landscapes and very quickly recalculate serviceability and reachability based on all of these markers.

Then adjust SAM and SOM automatically. This is the future: the living market model.

TAM expresses the world you could serve.

SAM expresses the world you can serve.SOM expresses the world you are realistically positioned to win — today, not last quarter.

This isn’t possible with disconnected tools. It only works inside a unified ontology with agentic apps maintaining the logic.

When mapped onto your ontology, TAM/SAM/SOM reveal your blind spots

The most valuable part of market sizing isn’t the number, it’s the discrepancies the process reveals.

When you map TAM, SAM and SOM onto your ontology, you see:

• Industries you believe you serve but structurally can’t
• Segments that look large but are cost prohibitive
• Customer types that mismatched your capability schema
• Workflows your platform can't yet support
• Regions made inaccessible by regulation
• Gaps in your internal data
• Bottlenecks that limit your obtainable market
• Overlaps that no one realised existed.

This is where TAM/SAM/SOM become an organisational diagnostic tool.

They don’t just tell you the size of the market, they tell you the shape of your organisation, your blind spots and the constraints you need to overcome to expand your serviceability.

It’s the closest thing to X-ray vision a business can have.

TAM, SAM and SOM become strategic levers when your goals are machine readable

Most companies treat TAM/SAM/SOM as inputs to strategy.

In intelligent organisations, they become outputs of strategy and inputs to continuous goal realignment.

Once goals are expressed in schema, agentic apps can reason about:

• Which markets maximise outcome probability
• Which segments deliver the best ratio of effort to value
• Which workflows to build next
• Which internal bottlenecks are limiting SOM
• Where capacity needs to be scaled
• Where pricing or product can shift to expand SAM

This means TAM/SAM/SOM become filters through which your organisation continuously decides where to focus.

Instead of leadership making decisions based on instinct, your operating system informs you where the smart opportunities are…and how they change over time.

This is what intelligent strategy looks like: decision engines, not decision documents.

Unified TAM/SAM/SOM restores organisational alignment

In a traditional organisation, every team defines the market differently. Marketing defines TAM through top-of-funnel personas, Product defines it through supported workflows, Sales defines it by who has budget and Finance defines it by who pays reliably.

This incoherence makes market decisions slow, political and error-prone. Inside Decidr, market definitions become structured, shared objects:

• Segments
• Industries
• Business sizes
• Capabilities
• Cost-to-serve
• Reachability
• Price bands
• Constraints
• Regulatory domains
• Workflow compatibility

All expressed once, in schema, and reused across the business.

Which means everyone is working from the same market.

Not a version or someone’s gut feel or even a spreadsheet in someone else’s email.

The market, expressed as structured intelligence.

Unified TAM.Unified SAM.Unified SOM.Unified strategy.

This is the final unlock: a single market truth for every team and every agentic app across the organisation.

Where TAM, SAM and SOM fit into the future of intelligent business

Most companies treat market sizing as a pitch deck requirement. Intelligent companies treat it as a structural asset.

TAM shows possibility.SAM shows capability.SOM shows reality.

And when all three live inside a shared ontology, continuously updated by agentic apps, they become one of the most powerful strategic signals an organisation can have.

This is why TAM, SAM and SOM matter so deeply at Decidr. Not as acronyms, not as diagrams, but as part of the intelligence architecture that makes an organisation coherent, coordinated and capable of adaptive decision making.