Product
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.
What the worker does
Competitive tracking with an AI worker is a weekly diff rather than a research report. The worker rereads the public pricing, changelog and product pages of the competitors you name, compares them against the snapshot it stored last week, and posts only what changed, with the date and the URL for each change. Everything behind a login or a sales call stays invisible to it.
- Runs
- Weekly
- Connections
- Web search, Notion, Slack
- Output
- Changes only
The problem with competitor research is that it expires
Somebody builds a thorough comparison deck in January. By March two of the six competitors have changed their pricing, one shipped the feature the deck said they lacked, and nobody has reopened the file. The deck is now worse than nothing, because people quote it.
Tracking is a different job from researching. It needs to be boring, it needs to happen every week, and it needs to report deltas rather than restate the whole landscape.
How the weekly run is briefed
A named list, not a category
Six named competitors and the specific pages that matter for each: pricing, changelog, the product page for the overlapping feature. Vague briefs produce vague scanning.
Snapshot, then diff
The worker stores what it read as a document, so next week's run compares against text rather than against memory. Documents in Polaris are versioned, so the history of a competitor's pricing page accumulates on its own.
Report changes, not the landscape
A week with no changes should produce a short comment saying nothing changed. Reports that restate everything every week stop being read by week three.
Date and link every claim
Each reported change carries the URL and the date it was observed. That is what makes the report usable in a sales conversation without someone having to re-verify it.
What the worker can see, and what it cannot
Worth being blunt about, because competitive intelligence tools tend to imply otherwise.
| Visible | Not visible |
|---|---|
| Public pricing pages and plan tables | Discounts given in negotiation |
| Public changelogs and release posts | Anything shipped behind a feature flag |
| Documentation and help centres | Roadmaps discussed with customers under NDA |
| Job listings and public announcements | Headcount, revenue or churn |
Where the report goes
As a comment on the task, and optionally into a Slack channel through the Slack connection, so the people who need it in a sales call see it without opening the workspace.
The Polaris Inbox works in the other direction too. A message in Slack pointing at something a competitor announced arrives as a prefilled task suggestion, with the bucket, lane, labels and owner already set, waiting for one click to become a real task.
Questions people ask
+How does the worker access competitor websites?
Through the open web search connection, which is part of the Polaris connection catalog. It reads public pages the same way anyone with a browser would, and it lists any page it could not reach rather than passing over it quietly.
+Will the report be different from what our sales team already knows?
Often it confirms what one person suspected and nobody had confirmed. The value is the date and the URL attached to each change, which turns a hallway claim into something quotable on a call.
+How many competitors is too many?
Past about eight, the weekly report stops being read. Most teams track the three they lose deals to and check the rest quarterly, which is also cheaper because billing follows the work actually delivered.
Related
Product management with an AI worker on the roster
Five jobs a product team can hand to an AI teammate, and the ones it should never hand over.
Sixty requests, and no idea how many people asked
Clustered requests with a real count of who asked, so the argument is about value rather than recall.
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.
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.
Web search in Polaris
Nothing to authorize, nothing to store, and every query a worker runs appears in the activity feed while it works.
Connect Slack to Polaris
Six scopes, no access to direct messages, and a bot that only reads the channels somebody invited it into.
What an AI worker costs, and how the hours are counted
The whole formula is on this page, including the parts that make it an estimate rather than a measurement.