Automation & AI work companion
Research & monitoring agent
There's information you ought to check regularly: what competitors are changing, what reviews are saying, which tenders come up, which funding is about to close. You ought to. In practice nobody looks – until someone else finds out first.
You'll get …
- 1
Changes get spotted without anyone looking
Competitor websites, review sites, industry and procurement sources are checked on a set schedule and compared with the last check.
- 2
A short report instead of twenty open tabs
What's changed arrives in condensed form where you already read things – by email, Slack or Notion.
- 3
An agent that knows your question
Sources, schedule and relevance filters are tailored to what you want to know. The assessing is still up to you.
01Intro
A monitoring agent does the looking for you: it checks defined sources on a set schedule, compares them with the last check and boils down what has changed into a short report – once a week in your inbox instead of twenty open tabs. As a tender scout, it tells you on Friday: these two opportunities are new and worth a look.
This isn't perfect market intelligence – what sources don't make available (legally or technically), the agent can't see either, and usage rights for each source are checked before setup. The results need human judgement: the agent gathers and condenses, you do the assessing. That's why this building block usually comes after the first projects, to go deeper – not as the starting point.
02How it works
- 01
Sharpen the question
What do you want to know – and what would you do with the answer? "Everything about the market" isn't a question. "Which tenders over €50k come up in our area?" is.
- 02
Choose and check the sources
Which websites, portals and feeds hold the answer – and may they be read automatically? Anything that isn't properly accessible is dropped or added manually.
- 03
Set the schedule and format
Daily, weekly, monthly – and where should it go: email, Slack, Notion? The best report is the one that gets read. Short beats complete.
- 04
Set up and fine-tune the agent
The first reports will be too noisy or too quiet – that's normal. Relevance filters and thresholds are adjusted until the signal-to-noise ratio is right.
- 05
Make it part of everyday work
The report gets a fixed slot: the Monday meeting, weekly planning, your time for winning new business. If nobody acts on the monitoring, it gets switched off – that's a result too.
03Stages
Tier 1 needs no infrastructure: one click, one report.
Starter: the report at the push of a button
A ready-made research workflow you start manually – on Fridays, for example, with one click. It shows the value before any tech gets built.
Next step: the scheduled agent
Fixed sources, a fixed schedule, an automatic email or Slack report that compares everything with the last check.
Full build: history and alerts
A dashboard with history, trends over months, instant alerts for defined events – once the monitoring has become part of everyday work.
04Try it yourself
The order scout of a fictional carpentry firm watches tender portals, two competitors and its own reviews. Press play – a week in half a minute.
2 new opportunities: tender for the sports-hall roof truss (deadline 28/07) · wave of inquiries after the storm in the district – check capacity.
Competition: Holzbau Maier is now actively advertising “extra storey in 4 weeks” – overlaps with your core offering.
Reputation: new 2-star review (missed deadline) – a draft reply is attached. The week's other 4 reviews: positive.
No action needed: timber-construction grant programme unchanged · material prices stable · website check of competitors with nothing else notable.
23 observed events became 4 lines – two of them potentially worth money. The judging stays with the human: only the business knows whether the sports-hall tender is worth it.
The workflow behind it: a schedule wakes the agent, which reads the sources, compares them with the last state and sorts by relevance. Only what matters ends up condensed in the report – the rest goes quietly to the archive. You do the judging at the end.
The rhythm comes from the schedule (daily, weekly), not from your attention.
05Technical implementation
- Source access to suit the situation: RSS feeds and APIs first, website crawling where permitted, manual uploads for the rest.
- A scheduler triggers the runs: cron, n8n, Make or a small custom worker.
- The language model condenses: what's new, what's changed, what's relevant – compared with the last check instead of a flood of raw data.
- Output to wherever you read: an email report, Slack/Teams, Notion/Obsidian or a simple dashboard.
- A small data store keeps track of history, sources and reports – trends can be built from it later.
- Hosting: a worker on Vercel/Render/Hetzner or an automation platform – deliberately lightweight.
for context · This shows how something like this usually gets built – not how it has to be built for you. What actually fits is worked out in the project: around your existing setup, your team, and what stays easy to maintain.