Our recent survey of 21 organizations reveals a familiar tension: Intelligence teams remain lean, yet their remit spans an expanding universe of stakeholders across strategy, product innovation, and go-to-market functions. These stakeholders seek a wide range of information and analyses — from competitive moves to market shifts and buyer expectations. We uncovered the following:
1. Intelligence teams are small but mighty.
Most market and competitive intelligence (M&CI) teams operate with limited staff: 13 of 21 respondents having five or fewer people and eight having just one or two. Even so, these teams support a broad set of stakeholders, most often between 500 and 5,000 users across executives, product, sales, and marketing functions. Nearly two-thirds of these organizations are using an M&CI platform, which can automate activities across the research process from information sourcing to curation, analysis, and distribution.
2. Top use cases span strategic, product, and go-to-market.
Despite their name, competitive intelligence teams are not focused solely on rivals. In addition to monitoring competitive developments, they track market trends and buyer shifts and synthesize these inputs to inform a wide range of strategic and tactical decisions. Top use cases include: go-to-market targeting, market and competitive response, product innovation, messaging and positioning, and identifying business opportunities. The ability to connect market, competitor, and customer insights is essential across these use cases.
3. Deliverables emphasize analysis over information.
Intelligence might once have been viewed as news aggregation with regular distribution of newsletters. Today, however, teams prioritize analytical outputs that interpret information rather than simply collecting it. The most valued deliverables include competitive SWOTs or profiles, market sizing or trend analyses, competitive landscapes, and product comparisons. Half of the surveyed organizations also produce sales battlecards — often the first formal deliverable an intelligence function develops, given typically strong sales demand. The shift from delivering “information” to providing “implications” is central to providing value to sales and other stakeholders.
4. Platforms and genAI drive efficiencies across the research process.
Twelve of 21 of the respondent organizations use an M&CI platform, and most report being somewhat or very satisfied. These platforms significantly improve efficiencies by sourcing broad information sets in near real time, allowing rapid search and summarization and automating distribution of deliverables. Users also point to using AI for increased automation and accelerated analysis, with some using it to create or autopopulate deliverables. The ability to synthesize internal and external information is becoming a critical differentiator as leaders seek fast and clear understanding of the impacts of external changes on their business.
5. Measuring success remains elusive.
Quantifying intelligence impact continues to be a sticking point, even with an M&CI platform. Most teams are tracking the number of analyses or deliverables created, the number of processes they support (e.g., revenue planning, product roadmaps, sales training), or the number of active or passive users. Just over one-third track win rates. Business outcomes such as revenue growth, campaign performance, or even time saved are harder to capture. Yet the majority of organization point to clear qualitative benefits: smarter investment decisions, better targeting, sharper messaging, and stronger marketing campaigns. Connecting insights to measurable impacts remains one of the field’s biggest hurdles.
What this means for intelligence teams:
Invest in processes before tools. Platforms can streamline your efforts but only when grounded in strong research processed, analytical methodologies, and clear standards for producing meaningful insights. Before investing in an M&CI tool, consolidate your information sources, assess stakeholder needs and gaps, and establish templates and workflows for research and analysis.
Use genAI for synthesis and speed. Market, competitive, and buyer research are ideal candidates for genAI. GenAI can dramatically accelerate the synthesis of external websites, user review sites, third-party reports, social media, internal surveys, and more. To get the most from genAI, ensure that summarizations include source links, create prompt libraries for less experienced users, and invest in an M&CI platform for more sophisticated generation or autopopulation of deliverables for automating in-depth research projects.
Create and measure success collaboratively. Tie intelligence metrics to business outcomes that matter to your stakeholder groups. Meet with executive, product, marketing, and sales teams individually to understand their workflows and decision areas. Embed the intelligence and analyses you produce into their decision-making processes. Use this as a way to measure the link from the intelligence to the business impact.
Interested in finding out more about M&CI best practices?
Clients can access the reports Build Competitive Advantage With A Winning Strategy And Program and The Five Levels Of Maturity For A Programmatic Approach To Market And Competitive Intelligence. You can also follow or connect with me on LinkedIn.
