In today’s hyper-competitive B2B landscape, knowing your competition isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a matter of survival. But ask any go-to-market leader and they’ll tell you: enabling your sales team to confidently compete is an uphill battle. The traditional approach to competitive intelligence (CI) is time-consuming, inconsistent, and often fails to keep up with the pace of change.

In a recent episode of the GTM Innovators podcast, I sat down with Jon White, SVP of Product at Crayon, to dig into how AI is flipping this dynamic—and empowering sales, product, and marketing teams to operate with a new level of speed and confidence.

Here are three major areas where AI is becoming a game-changer in competitive intelligence:

1. Arming Sales Teams in Real-Time with AI-Powered Enablement
Sales reps are on the front lines of competition. Yet, most teams admit they’re not well-equipped to sell against their competitors. The traditional battle card is static, often outdated, and rarely captures what actually works in the field.

By using AI, you can continuously update and refine competitive content—battle cards, talk tracks, objection handling—with insights pulled directly from sales calls, deal outcomes, and win-loss interviews. AI isn’t just speeding up the process; it’s making the output far more relevant and useful. Reps get what they need, when they need it, in language that resonates.

This isn’t about removing the human element—it’s about letting AI do the heavy lifting so sales teams can focus on selling.

2. Mining Competitive Signals from an Ocean of Internal Data
The intelligence your team needs is probably already inside your organization—it’s just buried. Thousands of data points live across call transcripts, Slack threads, CRM notes, and support emails. Manually surfacing insights from all of this is nearly impossible.

As Jon shares, you can let AI be your analyst. By integrating with tools like Gong, Slack, and Salesforce, Crayon uses AI to automatically extract emerging competitive trends, identify new entrants, and even surface the “ankle biters” that may be early threats. It can tell you which competitors are getting mentioned more often—and why.
This transforms what used to be an overwhelming flood of unstructured data into a strategic signal stream your team can act on.

3. Extending Competitive Intelligence Beyond Sales
While CI has traditionally been viewed as a sales enablement function, Jon makes the case that it’s now a company-wide advantage. Product managers use CI insights to validate roadmap decisions and differentiate features. Marketers use it to sharpen messaging and respond to shifting narratives. Executives use it to shape strategy and anticipate moves in the market.

Thanks to AI, competitive intelligence is no longer a quarterly PDF update—it’s a living, breathing asset that flows across the org in real-time.

Want to Hear More?
This is just scratching the surface of what we covered in the episode. If you’re a sales leader, marketer, product manager—or anyone involved in competing for market share—you won’t want to miss it.
Listen or watch the full episode here: AI + Competitive Intelligence – A Smarter Way to Compete, with Jon White from Crayon