10 ways to boost your Competitive Intelligence with Artificial Intelligence - Part II

10 ways to simplify, scale, or accelerate your competitive intelligence processes thanks to AI

Before reading this Part II, make sure to read Part I, in which I covered ways to use AI for competitor news tracking, mass research, large-scale customer feedback campaigns, CRM data analysis, and content creation.

In this blog post, we will review 5 more concrete ways to use AI to create resources and support Sales teams, and name-drop AI tools to consider for each of them.

These AI-powered CI processes can bolster your CI, but they are not miracle solutions that will work from day one or solve all problems. Moreover, always verify AI output, as AI tools are still prone to making mistakes. But we will discuss the risks of AI in another blog post.

Content proofing

Once you have created your competitive resources, such as landmines and objection rebuttals, ask AI to challenge your content to see how well your argument would withstand competitors’ rebuttal.

For instance, feed your landmines to your AI model, tell it to act as your competitor’s Sales representative, and ask it to use your competitor’s publicly available information to counter each of your arguments. Then, rework the arguments that the AI easily debunked.

Start with any AI deep search platforms, such as Perplexity Research and OpenAI ChatGPT Deep Research, which are quick and cheap to set up.

Small competitor coverage

Do you have too many competitors to cover? Make AI create simple competitive content for the smaller competitors that you cannot cover and for which Sales teams still request support.

First, give your AI model 5 to 10 vendor-level comparison criteria that matter most to your customers, for which it can find information about your competitor from publicly available sources and for which your company is likely to have an advantage.

Think of high level criteria such as analyst report ranking, number of industry awards, number of user reviews, breadth of use cases that each vendor addresses, or major capabilities that are easy to verify.

Then, document for AI how your company fairs for each criteria.

Afterwards, ask AI to search and document your competitor’s information for each criteria.

Next, task AI with comparing the competitor to your company for each comparison criteria.

Following that, make AI select the comparison criteria for which your company scores higher than your competitor, and for each of these comparison criteria, make AI write a paragraph that explains how your company performs better than the competitor and why it matters to customers.

Finally, post these AI-written differentiators on your CI portal, so that your Sales teams can easily access the content and use it on their own when facing small competitors.

The simplest way to get started is to prompt AI platforms with deep research options, such as Perplexity Research and OpenAI ChatGPT Deep Research. Break down each step into a dedicated prompt or task to make it more reliable.

Sales teams’ competitive positioning practice

It is best to make Sales reps rehearse pitching differentiators and objection rebuttals internally before letting them face competition in front of customers, but it is not scalable to have the CI Specialists make them practice individually.

Yet, nowadays, you can purchase Sales training tools that offer AI-powered customer simulations that your CI team can configure as competitive positioning sandboxes, in which Sales reps must pitch your differentiators and defuse competitive objections in front of an AI-powered customer persona.

At the end of the simulation, they even get a score and tips to better pitch against the competition later.

There are numerous platforms worth considering, and I do not have recommendations. Search online for "AI-powered Sales role plays".

Proactive Sales teams support

Supporting all Sales teams against the competition and delivering the right competitive resources at the right time are two major challenges for organizations with large sales forces.

So, make AI monitor Sales teams’ verbal and written customer conversations to identify competitive situations, and proactively deliver contextualized competitive resources according to the conversations’ themes and competition.

For instance, AI can monitor Sales teams’ customer calls and look for competitor names and customers’ business needs. Once AI identifies a combination of competitor and business need, it sends competitive information specific to that competitor for that business need to the Sales team right away (e.g., via email, chat app, or pop-up p window on the CRM opportunity page).

Ensure that the system does not send the full competitive content each time but only the parts specific to the specifics of each opportunity, such as probing questions, objection rebuttals, and landmines specific to the customer environment and business needs.

Search for "real-time Sales AI assistants" and consider tools such as Klue, and Winn.ai.

Reactive Sales teams support

Manually distributing CI to your entire salesforce and directly supporting Sales teams in all competitive deals is not scalable.

So, free up your CI Specialists' time by making your competitive resources and insight available in self-service and easy to navigate for your CI users thanks to an AI-powered CI assistant.

Configure an AI agent to digest all the competitive resources and information that your CI portal contains and create a simple frontend webpage for your Sales teams to ask it questions about the competition. That way, they quickly get the CI they need in the format they need and your CI team spends less time answering common competitive questions and more time on strategic research.

You can configure your own CI AI agent with private instances of tools like Microsoft ChatGPT or save you time by using CI platforms with pre-built AI agents such as Klue.

Calls to action

ThGet started by reading the Competitive Intelligence Alliance AI in CI Playbook and the Gartner Market Guide for Win/Loss Analysis Solutions (ID G00808237).

Then, obtain demos from Klue, Clozd, and Crayon, and get a Anthropic Claude subscription to experiment with these AI use cases.

Consult with your AI and legal councils to ensure you use AI in accordance with your company's policy before implementing AI in any of your CI processes, as CI teams handle sensitive data.