Almost every team we talk to has done a competitor teardown exactly once - a heroic week of tabs and screenshots that produced a deck everyone praised, which then aged quietly into fiction because nobody was ever going to repeat the week. The whole case for agentic competitive intelligence is that the value was never in the deck; it was in the cadence the deck could not sustain. This walkthrough shows the standing version end to end: what gets configured, what arrives each week, and what the humans do with it.
The situation this solves
The failure pattern is consistent across team sizes: competitive knowledge lives in one person's browser history, updates arrive as Slack links ("did we know they launched this?"), sales runs on battlecards dated two quarters ago, and the response to a rival's pricing change starts a week late because the change was discovered a week late. None of it is negligence - continuous watching is a workload no calendar survives, as the teardown anatomy piece argues. The program below replaces the workload rather than the judgment.
The setup: an afternoon
Configuration is three decisions. First the watchlist: five to eight rivals worth continuous attention - direct competitors, the adjacent player moving your way, the upstart underpricing everyone. Second the surfaces: per rival, which of pricing pages, product and changelog pages, blog and content output, ad libraries, hiring and funding signals, and review streams the market intelligence agent should watch. Third the materiality bar: what interrupts immediately (pricing change, major launch, funding round) versus what waits for the weekly brief. The competitive intelligence playbooks ship these as templates, so the afternoon is mostly deciding names and thresholds.
The weekly rhythm
| Artifact | Cadence | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| Delta brief | Weekly, per rival | What changed: pages, prices, ads, content, people - with links |
| Materiality alert | As it happens | The change that cleared the bar, plus first-read implications |
| Deep teardown | Monthly, rotating | Full-stack pass on one rival: positioning, product, GTM, momentum |
| Battlecard updates | On evidence | Proposed edits queued for approval before sales sees them |
The delta discipline is what keeps the program alive: week-one enthusiasm survives contact with week twelve only if the brief reports changes, never the full state re-described. A quiet week produces a three-line brief, and that brevity is the feature - the reader learns to trust that a short brief means a quiet week, so the long brief gets read with attention. Every claim carries its evidence link, per the platform's evidence-attached rule, so "they raised prices" is a diff of the pricing page rather than an assertion.
The monthly deep teardown
Once a month the agent runs a full competitor analysis on one watchlist member in rotation: positioning read from their own surfaces, product surface mapped against yours, GTM machinery (channels, content velocity, Meta Ad Library activity), pricing architecture, and momentum signals - hiring mix, review trajectory, announced customers. The rotation means each rival gets roughly two full passes a year with weekly deltas in between, which is more current than the heroic-week model ever achieved. The teardown lands as a structured document with a "what changed since the last deep pass" section up front - because the comparison against the prior teardown is where strategy actually reads from.
What changes for the team
Downstream, the artifacts compound: battlecards stay current because updates flow from evidence rather than quarterly heroics; the share of voice tracking gains context from knowing what rivals shipped; and the quarterly strategy conversation starts from a year of documented movement instead of memory. Teams running the program alongside the competitive intelligence solution typically wire the materiality alerts into the channel where revenue leadership actually lives, which is what turns intelligence into response time.
Frequently asked questions
How long does setup take?
An afternoon: pick five to eight watchlist rivals, choose which surfaces to watch per rival, and set the materiality bar for immediate alerts versus weekly briefs. The playbook templates carry the rest.
What arrives each week?
A delta brief per rival - only what changed, with evidence links - plus immediate alerts for anything clearing the materiality bar. Monthly, one rival gets a full-depth teardown in rotation.
How is this different from alert tools?
Alerts fire on mentions; the program reads surfaces, diffs them against last week, judges materiality, and writes implications - then feeds battlecards through an approval queue. It is the analysis layer, with the gathering underneath it.
What does the team still do?
The judgment: fifteen minutes reading deltas, deciding which items deserve a response, and approving battlecard changes. The gathering, diffing and drafting are the agent’s job.
Sources
Every playbook on this blog ships as a runnable mission.
Open a workspace and the playbook library is waiting - describe the outcome and the agents carry it end to end, on your plan's monthly credits.