We gave the job to a system, and it did it better

Our first thought was the obvious one. If nobody has time, hire someone. Give a person the job of watching competitors, customers, the market and the technologies we care about, and have them write it up every week.

Then you size it. Doing this properly for a mid-size B2B company is not a side task. It is closer to three full time people: one on competitors, one on the customer base, one on market and technology. And you would still have the same fragility, because when that person is on holiday, coverage stops.

So we built a system to do it instead. Not a chatbot you have to remember to ask. A set of standing jobs that run whether anyone thinks about them or not.

It works in four beats: competitors, customers, the market, and specific topics or technologies. Each one runs on a schedule, produces a report, and delivers it to the inbox of the people who need it. No login required to read it, because the people who most need the market view are the least likely to open another tool.

Underneath, each run does what a good analyst does. It checks the sources that matter and works out what is genuinely new since last time. It sorts that material by whether it changes anything for us. Then it digs properly into the few items that earn it, instead of skimming everything equally.

Then came the part that surprised us. It is better than the human version, for unglamorous reasons.

It never skips a week. It never gets pulled into an escalation. It applies the same standard to a quiet week as to a busy one, and it says plainly that nothing happened instead of padding. It remembers every previous week, so it reports what changed rather than what exists. And it never quietly decides that an account is boring.

The bar we set was not "impressive demo". It was "would a senior analyst have sent this". That turned out to be a much harder target, and a much more useful one.