The AI-Powered Strategy Function: 7 Steps for Faster Market Intelligence, Sharper M&A Screening, and Tighter Competitive Positioning

Staying current on your competitive landscape used to require a research team. Here's how to do it with a 10-minute weekly review.

Yesterday: Market monitoring is ad hoc: Google Alerts, periodic analyst report reading, conference attendance, Twitter. Coverage is inconsistent and incomplete. Material competitive developments are often identified weeks after they occur: through a sales team loss, a customer mentioning a competitor's new feature, or a board member who happened to attend the right conference.

Today: For each market vertical, configure a Peripheral Project to ingest continuously: competitor press releases and product announcements via Crayon or Klue, relevant analyst reports from AlphaSense, regulatory filings, earnings call transcripts from public comparables, and funding announcements from PitchBook. Peripheral syntheses all inputs, surfacing what changed in the competitive landscape, what analyst themes are emerging, and what regulatory developments warrant monitoring. Market intelligence becomes a 10-minute review of Peripheral's output, not a scattered daily exercise across multiple tools.

Tomorrow: Peripheral proactively surfaces material market developments the moment they occur, pushing Insights directly to the strategy team when a signal is significant enough to warrant an immediate response rather than waiting for the weekly synthesis to run.

Tools: AlphaSense  ·  Crayon  ·  Klue  ·  Peripheral Projects · Peripheral Insights

Most battle cards are outdated within 6 months of creation. Here's how to build battle cards that update automatically as the competitive landscape evolves.

Yesterday: Battle cards are built manually, reviewed annually if at all, and distributed to the sales team as static documents. By the time a rep uses one in a competitive deal, the competitor information may be 12 to 18 months stale. The cards reflect the competitive landscape at the time of creation, not the time of use.

Today: Job posting monitoring via Crayon or Klue reveals when a competitor is building new capabilities. Pricing page changes and press release monitoring capture product and partnership announcements. CRM win/loss data reveals which competitor arguments are resonating with customers. Peripheral ingests all of these signals continuously, syntheses them into dynamic battle cards, and updates them automatically as new information arrives. The sales team always has current competitive intelligence without the strategy team manually maintaining a single document.

Tomorrow: Peripheral pushes updated battle cards via Insights to the sales team automatically the moment a material competitive change is detected, ensuring that reps always have current intelligence in active deals without needing to request an update or check a shared document.

Tools: Crayon ·  Klue ·  Salesforce (win/loss) ·  Peripheral Projects · Peripheral Insights

Building an acquisition target shortlist the traditional way takes 2 to 3 weeks of analyst time. Here's how to do it in 48 hours, and get a better shortlist.

Yesterday: A three-person corp dev team spends two weeks building a target universe from PitchBook, scoring companies manually against strategic criteria, building preliminary financial profiles, and assembling a shortlist presentation. Without a dedicated corp dev function, this work falls to the VP Strategy, CEO, and CFO in addition to their primary responsibilities. Most M&A opportunities aren't pursued as rigorously as they warrant. 

Today: Build the acquisition criteria framework as a documented scoring rubric and upload it into a Peripheral Project: product adjacency, customer base overlap, geographic expansion, technology capability gaps, revenue multiple benchmarks. When an acquisition opportunity arrives (inbound from a banker or identified through market monitoring) upload the available materials. Peripheral evaluates the opportunity against the scoring rubric, extracts key financial metrics, benchmarks against comparable transactions, and flags the strongest and weakest strategic fit dimensions. By hour 24: a structured preliminary assessment is ready for the CEO.

Tomorrow: Peripheral maintains a continuously refreshed acquisition target universe, automatically re-scoring and re-ranking candidates as new funding rounds, leadership changes, and market developments emerge, so the shortlist is always current without requiring a manual screening exercise.

Tools: PitchBook  ·  CapIQ  ·  Peripheral Projects + Claim Validation · Peripheral Insights

Investment bankers send teasers on Tuesday afternoons and expect a response by Friday. The teams that respond specifically and quickly get the best allocations. Here's how to always be one of them.

Yesterday: The response to most teasers is either a generic expression of interest ('please send us the CIM') or a delayed response while the team scrambles to form a view. Neither builds credibility with the banker or the selling company. The deals worth pursuing require a fast, specific, informed response, which most teams can't produce without days of manual work. 

Today: Within one hour: upload teaser to Peripheral Project alongside existing market intelligence on the sector. The platform extracts key data points, benchmarks financial profile against comparable transactions, and generates preliminary strategic fit assessment. By hour three: the strategy lead has reviewed and made a judgment call. By hour four: a response is sent (specific, informed, and timely) that signals to the banker that your team is a serious potential acquirer.

Tomorrow: Peripheral generates a preliminary strategic fit assessment automatically the moment a teaser or CIM is uploaded, benchmarking the opportunity against the documented acquisition criteria and comparable transactions before the strategy lead has opened the file.

Tools: Peripheral Projects + Fortress  ·  CapIQ  ·  PitchBook comps

Every strategic plan contains assertions about TAM, market growth, and competitive positioning that are accepted as true but haven't been rigorously validated. Here's how to find and fix them before the board does.

Yesterday: Strategic plan assertions are reviewed internally, challenged based on the team's collective experience, and presented to the board as finished conclusions. The board probes the assumptions it finds most aggressive. The strategy team defends them in the meeting, sometimes successfully, sometimes by committing to 'follow up with more data.' Credibility takes a hit.

Today: Run a structured claim validation exercise on the strategic plan before finalization by uploading it into a Peripheral Project alongside external data sources: analyst reports for market size and growth rate claims, public comparable company disclosures for competitive positioning assertions, and internal cohort data for customer behavior assumptions. Peripheral cross-references every material assertion against the available evidence, flags the claims that are unsupported or inconsistent with external data, and ranks them by the magnitude of the potential discrepancy. The claims that survive are more defensible. The ones that do not are revised before the board meeting, not in it.

Tomorrow: Peripheral runs claim validation continuously throughout the year, flagging when market developments or new data make a previously validated strategic assertion no longer defensible, before the next board presentation surfaces the inconsistency.

Tools: PitchBook  ·  Gartner / Forrester reports  ·  Peripheral Claim Validation · Peripheral Insights

The annual strategy offsite produces a deck that nobody references after February. Here's how to produce a strategic analysis that drives decisions throughout the year.

Yesterday: The annual strategic planning process takes 6 weeks of intensive work: market analysis built from scratch, competitive assessment updated manually, scenario planning conducted in a conference room whiteboard exercise. The output is a strategy deck. The deck is presented, approved, and filed. By Q2, it's irrelevant because the market moved and nobody updated it.

Today: Build three strategic scenarios as Peripheral Projects: accelerate the core, expand into an adjacent market, make a transformative bet, and upload them as a structured Peripheral Project alongside the market intelligence repository and rolling forecast model. For each scenario, Peripheral generates an initial Project analysis: financial impact from the forecast model, competitive response assessment from the market monitoring data, execution risk from comparable company case studies, and market timing assessment from analyst data. The strategy team challenges and refines the outputs. The leadership team engages with finished scenarios at the offsite rather than building the analysis in the room.

Tomorrow: Peripheral maintains the three strategic scenarios Projects as living models throughout the year, automatically updating the financial impact and competitive response assessments as market conditions evolve, so the strategy always reflects current reality rather than the assumptions made at the annual offsite.

Tools: Miro · Peripheral Projects ·  PitchBook market data

At a visible growth-stage company, partnership proposals arrive constantly. Most are noise. Here's the system that reliably identifies the signal.

Yesterday: Partnership proposals are evaluated ad hoc, based on the enthusiasm of the team member who received the proposal, the perceived prestige of the potential partner, and whatever bandwidth is available in the strategy team. Genuinely strategic partnerships are occasionally missed because they arrived during a busy period. Marginal partnerships consume more evaluation time than they warrant.

Today: When a partnership proposal passes the strategic priority filter, upload the available materials into Peripheral. Peripheral generates a 48-hour preliminary assessment: specific value to each party, integration or collaboration requirements, comparable partnerships and their outcomes, and a realistic revenue or cost impact estimate over 24 months. For the board strategy narrative, Peripheral pulls the most material competitive and market developments from the intelligence repository since the last board meeting and connects them to the company's strategic priorities, generating a first-draft strategy section for the CEO to review and calibrate.

Tomorrow: Peripheral generates the board strategy narrative section automatically ahead of each quarterly board meeting, pulling the most material competitive and market developments since the last board and connecting them directly to the company's strategic priorities, ready for the CEO to review and calibrate.

Tools: Peripheral Projects + Insights  ·  PitchBook  ·  AlphaSense