Applying AI for competitive intelligence

Abstract

Increasing opportunities and competition at global level, rapidly changing government regulation and technology are stimulating companies to seek new ways of becoming more competitive. The definition of what and who constitute competition is also changing in the new economic environment. Competitive boundaries have blurred as companies diversify into different market/product and expand internationally. The need to continuously monitor the competitive horizon has become imperative due dynamic nature of competitive moves by rival firms. Companies supplying products and services to trade and distribution channels have found that a current customer can easily become a future competitor. The need to survive and grow has created the kind of dynamism in the industrial environment not seen few decades ago. It has become important to scan the environment continuously and react to the changes. As described above, the competition is intensifying on one hand and the complexity and volume of information available to firms to understand the competitive structure is increasingly exponential on the other. It is imperative that firms make use of all the available sources of data to gain deeper insight into the activities of firms that are either competitor today or could become potential competitors tomorrow. Technology has come to the aid to strategist and marketing professionals of the firms. It is now possible to gather information from sources that are distributed globally. The data collected from various sources can be analyzed quickly and efficiently using software tools and techniques, which are becoming affordable and increasingly powerful. A new area of gathering, monitoring and reacting to tactical and strategic changes by competitors' and other market force is gaining ground in organization. The new area is known as Competitive Intelligence (CI). This report delves into this emerging area in Corporate Strategy and identifies the ways and means of using Artificial Intelligence techniques and algorithms for strengthening this field. Artificial Intelligence is a branch of Computer Science that identifies ways of bringing liuman like' intelligence into computing systems. There are many technologies in AI that have found use in various applications.