How to Blend Human Intel with AI Results for Sharper Competitive Analysis

In our previous post, "How to Use AI for Competitive Intelligence and Analysis", we explored ways to ask AI to scan publicly available information and extract competitive intelligence value.

Yet, as smart as they already are, Answer Engines (AEs) still benefit from human input. Sometimes, it is as simple as feeding them ready-made info from third-party sources or CRMs, and other times, it is manually collected info.

Crashing the Gates of Exclusive Competitive Intelligence Sources

When the most valuable competitive intelligence, such as analyst notes, market size reports, or subscription-only datasets, hide behind a paywall, AI cannot access them directly. Some of those reports are sold for five-figure US dollar prices, typically way out of budget. Others simply require signing in for a free account. Regardless, there are some loopholes to access whole or part of that gated content for free and feed the collected content to your AI for analysis. 

Below is a breakdown of sources in categories and usable workarounds.

Equity & Financial Analyst Reports

Research notes from investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley) and firms like Morningstar or Zacks typically cover growth forecasts, competitor comparisons, and buyer surveys.

These extensive (and lengthy) reports provide comprehensive information about competitors. They are typically outrageously expensive. Luckily, concise summaries and analyst quotes are often available from other sources.

Workarounds:

• Financial press (Wall Street Journal, Barron’s) often quotes analyst notes.

• Market intelligence and search platforms such as AlphaSense aggregate tens of thousands of premium sources—deep financial documents, company filings, expert interviews, analyst reports, news, and regulatory content. Unfortunately, those require a typically pricey license

• Investor Relations (IR) decks, see prompt in the previous post, Financial and Analyst Reports section. 

Earnings Call Transcripts

These full transcripts of quarterly earnings calls contain management remarks plus live Q&A with analysts and, most importantly, the questions analysts actually care about. However, they are usually only accessible through expensive paywalled databases like FactSet or Bloomberg.

Workarounds:

• Investor Relations sites sometimes list full transcripts for free.

• Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance, or Seeking Alpha for partial transcripts and summaries.

Pro tip

Search Google for: site:company.com investor relations presentations PDF or site:ir.company.com earnings deck or site:seekingalpha.com "earnings call transcript" Company_Name. To avoid old transcripts, use date filters in Google Past month/quarter/year Q2 2025, FY 2024, etc.

Industry Analyst Firms (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, 451 Research)

Each of these firms has its own benchmark, i.e., Magic Quadrants, Waves, MarketScapes, ranking vendors in categories. These reports are only available to those ready to pay for their expensive subscription. However, there are ways to access some of these for free, usually with a delay.

Workarounds: 

Find and download (or copy-paste if download is not available) vendor-sponsored reprints. Typically, these reprints are only available for a limited period, so running a search for them every month is highly recommended.

Pro tip

Here are a few Google search options. Just replace datadoghq.com with the appropriate URL definer of your target vendor. (i.e., snowflake.com, crowdstrike.com) and analyst_name with Gartner, Forrester, or other. These are great to search manually or refine prompts. For example

site:datadoghq.com ("analyst_name" "complimentary" OR "451 Research" "licensed reprint" OR "451 Research" "complimentary access") OR (filetype:pdf "451 Research" Datadog)

You can also ask your LLM to run the search for you as follows, replacing the (e.g., datadoghq.com, snowflake.com, crowdstrike.com) specification in this example with the competing vendors’ names.

Prompt sample Search for vendor-hosted analyst report reprints (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, 451 Research, GigaOm, Ovum) published in the last [X time period]. Focus on ‘licensed reprint,’ ‘complimentary access,’ or ‘complimentary report’ pages. Limit the search to official vendor websites (e.g., datadoghq.com, snowflake.com, crowdstrike.com).

For each result, provide:

• Analyst firm (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, 451 Research)

• Vendor name

• Report title (e.g., Magic Quadrant, Forrester Wave, IDC MarketScape)

• URL of the reprint page

• Date of publication (if available)

Return results as a table with columns: Analyst Firm | Vendor | Report Title | URL | Publication Date.

Prompt results

Note: This AI Competitive Intelligence report was generated by Gemini Deep Research, and the results are displayed raw,  without modification or verification.

See results on Google Sheet Sample AI Search for Vendor-Hosted Analyst Report Reprints.

There are more competitive intelligence sources, such as  Market Research Firms (Frost & Sullivan, Omdia, MarketsandMarkets, Statista), CI & Data Platforms (Crunchbase Pro, PitchBook, CB Insights, PrivCo), Premium News & Business Media, but detailed analysis and sample prompts would make this post far too long. They are, however, included in the summary table below.

Free vs. Gated or Partially Available Source + Workarounds

Source	Free / Partially Accessible	Gated / Paid Access	Workarounds / Tools
Equity & Financial Analyst Reports	Press/blog excerpts, some Seeking Alpha summaries	Full notes from Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Jefferies, Morningstar, Zacks, etc.	AlphaSense, Sentieo, or broker “teasers”; follow analyst mentions in the financial press
Earnings Call Transcripts	Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance, partial Seeking Alpha transcripts	FactSet, Refinitiv, Bloomberg Terminal	Free trial on Seeking Alpha Pro; some company IR pages host full transcripts
IPO & SEC Filings (S-1, 10-K, 10-Q)	Always free on SEC EDGAR, UK Companies House, EU equivalents	N/A	Use BamSEC, EDGAR full-text search, or free SEC API for faster queries
Industry Analyst Firms	Vendor-sponsored reprints (e.g., Gartner MQ, Forrester Wave PDFs)	Full Gartner, Forrester, IDC, 451 Research subscriptions	Check vendor sites for free reprints; use library/business school access if available
Market Research Firms	Free abstracts, high-level stats in press releases	Full Frost & Sullivan, Omdia, MarketsandMarkets, Statista reports	Statista offers limited free charts; Google Scholar sometimes surfaces excerpts
CI & Data Platforms	Crunchbase free tier, limited PrivCo previews	CB Insights, PitchBook Pro, Crunchbase Pro, PrivCo full, AlphaSense, S&P CapIQ	Combine free Crunchbase + LinkedIn + press; use Owler or Tracxn (lower cost alternatives)

Even with the necessary manual verification of the info provided through AI search, the search process acceleration is invaluable. However, it does not replace competitive intelligence collected by human interaction through direct and informal sources.

Human Competitive Intelligence Sources

When your people are in direct contact with users, leads, and competing vendors, they are ideally placed to collect intelligence unavailable in free or gated publications. Even better, that information will be unique and field-confirmed.

Below are the main sources to collect that information:

Sales teams 

Salespeople are typically required to fill out the Salesforce or other CRM call summary. Yet, that is time-consuming and, when they add it,  their summary is typically as laconic as possible. Listening to call recordings (Gong, Chorus, Zoom) provides a far more nuanced context of why deals are won or lost and which objections come up most often.

A well-prompted AI can summarize transcripts and identify trends.

Customer success and support 

Information from existing customers is key to identifying what features they appreciate, have difficulty with, or would like to see. They might even mention features from named competitors they would like to see or find crucial enough to consider migrating to another vendor.

Channel partners and resellers

Partners compare vendors every day. They gather fresh insights from candid conversations during joint pitches or informal chats. One of the easiest ways to collect these insights is to create a custom field in your CRM and incentivize partners to fill it.

Events

Industry events like Black Hat, Infosec, brim with competitive signals, ranging from new products at booths, roadmaps, and strategy shared in sessions or on stage to position strategy. It is the perfect place to capture what competitors are saying, what questions are asked at their booths, what is their main messaging and more. Handing your team a simple “Top 3 takeaways” template after each event makes it easier to centralize the insights they collected.

Pro template

Top 3 takeaways

Takeaway 1: Competitor [Name] → [Key announcement, feature launch, pricing signal, etc.]

Takeaway 2: Attendees asked about [Theme / Feature] at [Competitor] booth → Indicates [demand/concern/trend].

Takeaway 3: [Competitor exec/keynote/panel] emphasized [Messaging / Strategy] → Suggests focus on [market / vertical / product area].

When time is short to perform a human analysis of all the material, it can be fed to an AI to extract trends and other relevant information.

This concludes the last part of our competitive analysis series.

Our next post will be about how to use competitive intelligence to populate the content calendar.