Artificial Intelligence is a powerful asset to your team. Businesses see it as an essential way to remain in ever-changing markets.
AI helps fuel knowledge-gathering efforts, visualize data, deliver information in a timely fashion, and dive deeper into thousands of sources that the average person could never find.
AI has become an essential tool for business teams, and in this blog, we are outlining why AI is essential for your competitive intelligence (CI) program.
Gather Thousands of Relevant Sources
Gathering information requires more time and energy than most people or companies can afford to spend.
Tasking a single person, a team of people, or even an entire department to manually sift through tons of information could quite literally take them an eternity.
Artificial intelligence helps you gather information from hundreds of thousands of sources and insights.
There are far too many sources of intel for any human to track themselves. Without AI, they would spend all their time doing research to understand what’s happening, which makes it difficult for them to track real-time updates and changes.
AI can also gather insights from news sources, evolving external markets, social media, website tracking, job review boards, thought leadership, events, and many other sources.
Filter Information for Relevant Insights
Filtering helps you focus on relevant information—each team can also have a different definition of what is relevant, and AI accommodates for that.
What is relevant to a sales team is different from what would be relevant to a product team. AI can help filter this information for delivery so that these teams can focus on strategizing the information pertinent to them.
Without the filtering and accessibility capabilities that AI provides, it is incredibly hard to sort through and make sense of the vast amounts of intelligence available.
Act as a Watchdog
AI can act as your watchdog on hundreds of thousands of sources, ensuring you don’t miss minute changes or updates.
It can monitor changes to websites, updates to articles, a refresh to downloadable content, and new thought leadership trends, which are all things that would consume considerable bandwidth to a team of people.
AI in your CI program will ensure that you don’t miss a step that your competitors, the market, or industry trends take.
It will keep track of the information you set as important and relevant, the sources you want to keep an eye on, and the competitors you believe are the biggest threats to increasing your market share.
Visualize Trends for Clear Decision-Making
Visualizing data and trends are vital components to making business decisions.
AI can help pull out trends and visualize huge amounts of data at a pace that people could never achieve.
This makes the data immediately actionable since they can quickly see what’s happening and what the impact is.
For example, product teams could see trends in hiring data for UX to know what’s coming in a competitor’s roadmap; marketing could see content and thought leadership trends, and executives could see territory experimentation and market interest.
Benefits of AI
Overall, there are a multitude of benefits when using AI for your competitive intelligence program.
AI can reduce the number of redundancies you or your team find in research conducted individually. By allowing AI to gather all the data for you and your team to analyze, you save time and reduce duplicated efforts.
Another benefit to using AI is the increased speed and productivity your business might see across multiple teams.
With AI gathering information for you and assisting in visualizing the data, your teams can make more actionable decisions and further analyze data by saving time on the information gathering.
This helps increase the speed at which your business can make informed decisions to remain competitive in their industry.
AI is an incredibly powerful tool that can improve the efforts of any business team by collecting data, visualizing it, and monitoring any changes in the sector. And it's been proven to be an essential component of quality competitive intelligence programs.
Evalueserve is one AI solution for competitive intelligence that can help. It uses AI to source intelligence from various types of public sources such as news, job postings, websites, thought leadership, social media, and product reviews so that users can get comprehensive coverage on competitors, marketers, clients, and suppliers.
Zach Hover
Zach Hover is marketing coordinator at Evalueserve, an AI-powered competitive intelligence tool.