Know what competitors are doing every week, automatically

What is the business problem, and what does it cost?

Competitive intelligence is usually everyone's job and nobody's job. A product manager spots a new feature in a rival's release notes. A salesperson hears about a price cut from a prospect. A recruiter notices a competitor hiring heavily in a region you plan to enter. Each signal arrives in a different place, at a different time, and rarely reaches the people who set strategy.

The hidden cost is slow reaction. By the time leadership hears about a competitor's move, the offer is already in front of your customers and the sales team is already losing deals. Teams often describe spending hours each month assembling a rough picture by hand, and then abandoning the effort when urgent work returns.

• Price changes noticed weeks after customers have already compared options
• Product launches discovered through customer complaints rather than planning
• Hiring surges missed, so new competitor capabilities arrive without warning

What changes for the organisation?

With a weekly digest, competitor awareness becomes a routine rather than a rescue. Leaders receive the same concise briefing every week, covering the competitors and topics they have chosen. Changes are highlighted, not buried in pages of text. Over time, the team builds a shared memory of how the market is moving.

The digest also improves conversations. Sales can reference a verified recent change rather than a rumour. Product and marketing can test their plans against what rivals have actually done, not what they remember.

• One agreed weekly briefing replaces scattered, informal updates
• Sales, product and marketing work from the same recent facts
• Leadership spends minutes on market awareness each week

How does Claude connect to your systems?

Claude uses Claude in Chrome, which works in a web browser much as a careful researcher would. It visits the public pages you specify, such as competitor pricing pages, product announcements, newsroom pages and published job listings. It records what each page says today and compares it with the record from the previous week.

Claude Cowork carries out the multi-step work: gathering the pages, comparing them, drafting the digest and placing it where your team already works. The finished digest is posted to a Teams channel for leadership and saved in a SharePoint library for reference. Teams notes and reference material can be kept in Notion if that is where your strategy team works. For the wider picture of how Claude fits with your Microsoft 365 estate, see Claude for Microsoft 365 and enterprise transformation. A closely related automation is An on-brand content engine for every channel: one idea, every channel, always on brand. It is built on Claude in Chrome, from Anthropic.

• Claude in Chrome reads only public pages on the list you approve
• Claude Cowork compares this week with last week and drafts the digest
• The digest lands in a Teams channel and an archive in SharePoint or Notion

A day in the life: before and after for a marketing director

Before automation, the marketing director spends most Friday afternoons opening a dozen competitor websites, copying prices into a spreadsheet and searching job boards. The exercise takes half a day, is often incomplete, and by the time it is finished the information is already a week old. The results sit in a personal file that nobody else sees.

After automation, the director opens Teams on Monday morning and reads a one-page digest. It lists three changes: a competitor has raised its entry price, launched a new integration, and posted four roles in a market you plan to enter. Each item states what changed, what it may mean and a suggested question for the next leadership meeting. The director spends fifteen minutes deciding what to take forward.

Governance, security and permissions

The system watches only public information that your team has approved. It does not log into competitor accounts, access confidential material or read private communications. Claude only sees what each user is already allowed to see inside your own Teams and SharePoint environment, so the digest channel and archive can be restricted to the people who need them.

Every digest is a draft for human review. Named people in leadership decide which signals matter, whether to act, and what to say externally. Source links are included with each finding so that anyone can verify the information. The design supports the expectations of good governance, though it does not replace your own legal or competition review where that applies.

• Only public pages on an approved list are monitored
• Named leaders approve any action or external communication
• Each finding links to its source for easy verification
• Access to the digest follows your existing Teams and SharePoint permissions

How do you measure success?

Measure the routine rather than the report. Track whether the digest arrives on time each week, how many leadership discussions reference it, and how quickly the business responds to significant competitor moves. Teams typically see the time spent on manual market research fall substantially within the first quarter, freeing marketing and strategy staff for analysis that informs decisions.

Review the list of monitored competitors and topics every quarter. As your market shifts, the watch list should shift with it.

• Time spent on manual competitor research, before and after
• Speed from competitor move to leadership discussion
• Number of digest items that led to a recorded decision

How do you start?

Begin with a free automation audit. The audit identifies the competitors that matter most, the public signals worth tracking, and the Teams and SharePoint spaces where the digest should live. We then build a pilot covering a small number of competitors for four to six weeks, refine the format with your leadership team, and extend the watch list once the digest is trusted.