Context and objectives

A growing professional services firm maintained a comprehensive list of competitors that was rarely utilized due to the significant manual effort required to track their activities. The firm faced a strategic dilemma: the risk of navigating "blind" to major market trends and competitor moves versus the prohibitive cost of dedicating skilled human resources to constant monitoring.

The objective was to deploy an automated solution capable of generating a periodic digest of competitor activity. The system needed to replace ad-hoc, manual checks with a systematic, scalable process that required minimal human intervention while ensuring high relevance and accuracy of the gathered intelligence.

Approach

We designed and implemented an automated workflow to monitor, filter, and summarize market activities.

• Multi-channel data collection: The system aggregates data from diverse sources, including social media for direct company updates, news aggregators for sector-specific announcements, and RSS feeds for granular website changes.

• Intelligent filtering: Large Language Models (LLMs) analyze incoming data streams against predefined strategic topics. This ensures only relevant information is retained, filtering out noise and structuring unstructured web data into coherent categories.

• Automated verification: To mitigate the risk of generative AI inaccuracies, particularly with social media content, a secondary verification layer was introduced to cross-reference generated summaries against original source text.

• Modular orchestration: The architecture was built on a robust workflow automation platform to handle complex logic and secure authentication. The design is technology-agnostic, allowing for the interchange of data sources, LLM providers, or output formats as business needs evolve.

Results

The deployment of the automated competitive watch transformed the firm’s market intelligence capabilities.

• Streamlined intelligence delivery: Stakeholders now receive a structured monthly executive summary via email and internal messaging channels, providing immediate visibility into competitor pricing, strategic shifts, and new offerings with direct links to sources.

• Operational efficiency: The solution eliminates the need for staff to perform manual scraping and monitoring, resulting in significant time savings and allowing teams to focus on strategic interpretation rather than data collection.

• Cost efficiency: The workflow provides a highly customized alternative to expensive external market analysis subscriptions, delivering a rapid return on investment.

• Strategic agility: The project successfully demonstrated the capability to deploy agentic workflows for complex tasks, paving the way for future applications such as automated price configuration auditing.