Role
Hire an AI competitive analyst
Assign it every Monday and you get a written record of what your market did last week, with a URL behind every line of it.
What this worker is
An AI competitive analyst in Polaris is a worker you hire to track named competitors and write up what changed. It reads public pricing pages, product announcements, job postings and press coverage with live web search, records what moved since the last brief, separates a real strategic shift from routine noise, and delivers the write-up as a document with sources.
- Typical output
- Watch brief with source trail
- Core connection
- Web search
- Illustrative task
- 4.0 human-hours, $7.90
What this worker is great at
Keeping a written record where none exists. Most teams know their competitors changed something and cannot say when, which means every strategy conversation restarts from memory. A weekly brief in a versioned doc gives you a timeline: the price moved in March, the positioning changed in May, the job postings for a data team started in June.
Pricing pages are its best surface. It records the tiers, the limits, what moved into the paid plan and what quietly left it, and it quotes the page rather than paraphrasing it. Job postings are the second best, because a company hiring five people for a new team has told you what it is building whether it meant to or not.
The judgement it adds is separation. A blog post is not a strategy change. A pricing page rewrite plus a new role plus a changed homepage headline usually is, and the brief says which of the three it thinks you are looking at.
What to connect it to
Web search
The entire role. Everything it reports comes from public sources it can cite, which is also the reason this work stays defensible.
Notion
When the competitive wiki lives there and each brief has to extend a page the sales team already reads.
Google Drive
For the quarterly summary that goes into a board pack.
Slack
So the sighting somebody posts in a channel becomes a prefilled task rather than scrolling away.
What a monthly watch costs
Illustrative, computed from the published human-hours formula: four competitors reviewed in one session, delivered as a doc and a PDF.
| Observed effort | Human-equivalent minutes |
|---|---|
| Picking up the task | 15 |
| 8 live web searches at 12 min each | 96 |
| 6,300 characters of finished prose at 90 chars/min | 70 |
| 4 acceptance criteria ticked at 8 min each | 32 |
| 1 progress comment, 1 doc, 1 PDF | 25 |
| Total: 4.0 human-hours at $2 | $7.90 |
Where the human stays in charge
The analyst prepares
- What changed, with the date and the source
- A separation of signal from routine noise
- A running timeline across months
- A quarterly summary for a board pack
You decide
- Whether to respond at all
- What your own pricing does next
- Which competitor is genuinely the threat
- What goes in front of customers or investors
What an AI competitive analyst is not good at
It only sees what is published. Private roadmaps, unannounced pricing experiments, deals lost on terms nobody wrote down and anything discussed in a customer call are invisible to it. Your sales team knows things this worker never will, and the brief is better when their notes are pasted into the task.
It is also not continuous. A worker runs when a task is assigned, so competitive watching is a recurring task you create rather than a monitor that pings you the moment a page changes. Weekly or monthly is the honest cadence.
And it should not be asked to guess motive. It can tell you a competitor moved their cheapest tier from twelve dollars to nineteen, and it cannot tell you whether that was confidence or desperation. Briefs that speculate about intent tend to be the ones that age worst.
Questions people ask
+Does the AI competitive analyst monitor competitors continuously?
No. It runs when you assign it a task, so the pattern that works is a recurring weekly or monthly task per competitor set. Between runs, nothing is watching, and the brief says what changed since the previous one rather than pretending to be live.
+Where does the information come from?
Public sources found through live web search: pricing pages, changelogs, blogs, job postings, press coverage and public repositories. Every claim in the brief carries the URL behind it so you can read the original before acting on it.
+Can it track competitors we cannot name yet?
Ask it to find them first. Given the problem you solve and the buyer you sell to, it will search for who else is selling into that space and return a list with evidence, which is a different task from watching a set you already know.
+How is this different from a research analyst?
The research analyst answers a question once. The competitive analyst maintains a record over time, which means its value comes from the second and tenth brief rather than the first, and its skill file is written around consistency of format rather than depth on a single question.
Related
Hire an AI research analyst
Assign the question on Tuesday afternoon and read the brief before your Wednesday call, with every claim carrying the URL it came from.
Hire an AI SDR
It does the twenty minutes of account research nobody has time for, and hands you a first line that could only have been written about that company.
Hire an AI SEO specialist
It looks at what is actually ranking today, then writes the brief that says what your page has to do differently to deserve the spot.
Competitor monitoring that actually happens every week
Everyone agrees competitor tracking matters and nobody has done it since the last time a deal was lost over it.
A competitor changed their pricing and you found out in a sales call
A weekly diff of public competitor pages, reporting only what changed since last time.
Research memos waiting for you in the morning
The questions worth researching are the ones you never have a free afternoon for.
Web search in Polaris
Nothing to authorize, nothing to store, and every query a worker runs appears in the activity feed while it works.
Work log
The record that makes an unwatched run reviewable afterwards.