The Challenge: When Competitive Intelligence Becomes Competitive Disadvantage
In the global battery market, competitive positioning shifts rapidly. New capacity announcements, technology breakthroughs, regional expansions, and partnership deals reshape the landscape monthly. For manufacturers competing across lead-acid, lithium-ion, and emerging chemistries, staying current on competitor movements isn't optional. It's existential.
For one of the world's largest battery manufacturers, competitive intelligence had become a resource trap. The company maintained a global CI program tracking 30+ competitors across lead-acid and emerging battery technologies spanning four regions: Americas, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM.
Each competitor profile required extensive manual effort:
- 50-70 hours of desk research per profile to pull relevant sources from company filings, press releases, and news articles
- 6-9 hours extracting and normalizing data across financial metrics, production capacity, and market positioning
- 30-40 hours sense-checking and solidifying insights through validation loops and primary research
- 5-6 hours on client presentation prep to develop executive storylines and anticipate questions
For a full competitor profile refresh, the team invested approximately 90-125 hours. Multiply that across 30 competitors, and the CI team spent thousands of hours annually just maintaining baseline intelligence.
The deeper problem wasn't just effort. It was responsiveness. When a competitor announced a new manufacturing facility or technology partnership, the team needed days to assess implications. Ad-hoc queries from regional business leaders required manual research to pull insights from existing profiles. Strategic questions went unanswered because the team was buried in routine updates.
One CI director put it bluntly: "We had four years of detailed intelligence sitting in profiles and presentations, but when the business needed an answer quickly, we were still manually searching through files and reconstructing context. Our knowledge was trapped in documents instead of being accessible."
The company needed to move from reactive reporting to proactive intelligence. From profiles that went stale between annual refreshes to living intelligence that evolved with the market.
The Solution: AI Agents Turn Static Reports into Always-On Intelligence
Evalueserve had supported the company's global CI program for four years, building deep expertise in battery market dynamics, competitor positioning, and regional nuances. Rather than simply continuing manual profile updates, Evalueserve deployed an AI-agent approach to transform how intelligence was created, maintained, and accessed.
The solution operated across two dimensions: accelerating routine CI workstreams and unlocking trapped intelligence.
Accelerating Core CI Workflows
AI agents targeted the most time-intensive elements of competitor profile development:
Desk Research & Source Collection (18-20% efficiency gain)
AI performed deep research to identify the 20-30 most relevant sources from company filings, press releases, and news articles, presenting a clean reading list. This replaced hours of manual search and tab-hopping across databases.
Data Extraction & Normalization (~15% efficiency gain)
AI captured and calculated financial metrics, capacity data, and market positioning to the required output structure. The system analyzed vehicle production data and import-export statistics from tested public databases, improving accuracy and eliminating manual copy-paste errors and unit conversion mistakes.
Sense-Checking & Insight Validation (~15% efficiency gain)
AI ran validation loops on production, sales, and investment information, comparing against market trends and previous competitor behavior. This ensured proper positioning of insights and flow of storyline before human review.
Presentation Prep & Summary (25-30% efficiency gain)
AI developed crisp executive storylines and banks of likely Q&A, using brainstorming capabilities to run quick mocks and provide pacing and clarity recommendations.
Ad-Hoc Query Response (8-10% efficiency gain)
AI leveraged reasoning and deep-research tools to address queries from existing CI profiles or emerging competitor developments, accelerating hypothesis development and response times.
Across the full CI workflow, these improvements delivered 15-20% average efficiency gains per profile.
Unlocking Trapped Intelligence
Beyond workflow acceleration, Evalueserve deployed an AI agent on the company's Insightsfirst platform where years of CI research and data were stored. The agent extracted data from the curated database based on parameters selected (region, competitors, technology), ran custom prompts in the background, and generated zero-draft structured reports.
For example, when the business sought to understand specific manufacturing capacities of competitors, the agent pulled data from hundreds of previous research deliverables and synthesized it into a structured capacity analysis. What previously required an analyst to manually search through files, extract relevant data points, and build a custom report now happened in under 30 seconds with two clicks.
As part of the managed CI program, each recurring business question would become a unique agent available for self-serve. Business leaders could accelerate insights generation without waiting for the CI team to manually compile responses.
The Impact: 15-20% Efficiency Gains
The AI-enabled approach delivered measurable impact across multiple dimensions:
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Efficiency Gains Across CI Workstreams
- CI profile updates: 15-20% average efficiency gain per profile
- Market intelligence studies: 10-15% average efficiency gain per study
- Ad-hoc queries: 8-10% cumulative efficiency gain across requests
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Margin Improvement
Gross margin improvement of 4-6 percentage points, including the cost of GenAI license acquisition in the first year.
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Strategic Capacity Unlocked
By leveraging AI for repetitive and standard workflows, analysts shifted focus to "so-what" recommendations and bespoke client requests. The team moved from data compilers to strategic advisors.
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Enhanced Engagement
The solution enabled weekly newsletters, job tracking, and social media trend monitoring. The CI team delivered up-to-date industry updates beyond the existing cadence, engaging key stakeholders continuously rather than only during quarterly reviews.
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Sharper, Accuracy-Assured Intelligence
AI served as a second brain for fact-checking and data creation, supporting analysts in building intelligence with higher confidence and cleaner storylines. The system caught inconsistencies and flagged gaps before reports reached stakeholders.
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Real-Time Competitive Insights
Perhaps most transformative was the move from static to dynamic intelligence. The Insightsfirst AI agent meant business leaders could generate on-demand competitor capacity decks (chemistry, plant, year, status) with summarized insights in seconds.
One regional strategy director captured the shift: "We used to wait days for the CI team to compile competitor capacity data for a strategy review. Now we pull it ourselves in real-time during the meeting and pressure-test scenarios on the fly."
The template developed for battery competitor monitoring became applicable to any capital-heavy sector: solar, semiconductors, chemicals, specialty materials. The same logic that tracked battery manufacturing capacity could monitor capacity expansions for any industry where production scale drives competitive advantage.
By transforming CI from a periodic reporting function to an always-on intelligence capability, the company turned competitive intelligence from a cost center into a strategic weapon. Intelligence that once aged in static reports now evolved continuously, accessible instantly, and scaled across the enterprise.
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Overview & Impact
One of the world's largest battery manufacturers transformed its CI program with AI agents, achieving 15-20% efficiency gains in profile updates and real-time competitive insights, unlocking strategic capacity and enhancing engagement.
