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Hey. You want to know the best tools for competitive intelligence? The best books? The big moves your competitors have made? That’s the Aqute Angle. Puns are free.
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COOL TOOLSStraight from our analysts’ desks, here are 2 cool tools to research your competitors. One for a whole range of data, one for pricing. Sure, nothing is as life-changing as proper analysis from Aqute, but these tools can get you started on your own research.
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#1: LinkedIn. Come on, not aNotHEr generic LinkedIn tip! Er, you haven’t heard this one before. These days, it’s hard to find intelligence on LinkedIn because employees have been told not to blab about what they do (we’re looking at you, HR enforcers…). But filter your search for who used to work at your competitor, and you’ll find people spilling all the tea about their old employers. Example below is made-up so no one gets into trouble.
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#2: The UK government. Oh yes, people - the world’s best public resource for competitor pricing may well be the UK government. Thousands of vendors’ list pricing, completely open.
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HOT NEWS IN B2B SAAS With all the news about AI taking our jobs, is this reflected in LinkedIn counts of employees and job postings?
Employee count vs. 3 months: Microsoft flat, Salesforce +2%, Adobe flat, Asana +1%, Atlassian +4%, ServiceNow +4%, HubSpot +3%, Slack +2%, Zoom +2%. Job postings vs. 3 months: Microsoft -60%, Salesforce +16%, Adobe +7%, Asana -7%, Atlassian -25%, ServiceNow +5%, HubSpot -6%, Slack +3%, Zoom -40%. So, perhaps stagnation more than apocalypse? Are you keeping track of all the AI agents? Check these ones out: Gemini for Customer Experience, Salesforce Agentforce, Microsoft Copilot for Retail and Agent 365, Claude Cowork, OpenAI Frontier, ServiceNow EmployeeWorks and Autonomous Workforce, Perplexity Computer.
One fork that the industry is working through is launching individual agents vs. agent management planes. A point solution vs. platform debate that IT has been through before. In M&A news, not much is happening, with total deal value similar to recent years. Accenture is buying Ookla (analytics), Faculty (AI services) and an AI division of Avanseus. Harvey made a couple of small acquisitions. OpenAI bought OpenClaw. Companies waiting to IPO include Genesys, Databricks, Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva and Discord. But Databricks raising money privately and Stripe buying its employees’ shares suggests they’re holding off. Not surprising – recent IPO Navan is down 50% in a few months, caught in the saaspocalypse.
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HEAR IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINERight now, your competitor is telling an innocent client Very Mean Things about you. Do you want to know what they’re saying? Do you want to know if clients believe it? Ask us. We can find out, right from the horse’s mouth.
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BEDTIME READINGBusiness books guaranteed to make you cool, wealthy and happy, or your money back.
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#1 Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy. The real change from AI isn't job losses. It's that the whole game gets reshuffled. How will structures and power dynamics change? #2 Impact-First Product Teams. How can you align your product team with the outcomes that matter to your company, avoiding process theatre and focusing every decision on demonstrable impact? #3 The Thinking Machine. Nvidia’s rise from gaming-chip maker to AI hardware powerhouse, driven by Jensen Huang’s long bet on GPUs and parallel computing.
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That’s all for now, people — until the next time!
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