Patience pays. But only if you have the right intelligence.

Agreed. Run their last fifty blog posts through a topic model. Cluster the themes. See where they are investing narrative energy. That tells you where they are heading before any press release.

And cross-reference that with their job postings. If they are writing about AI ethics but hiring ad-tech engineers, the narrative and the strategy have diverged. That divergence is valuable intelligence.

Now that is a genuinely dangerous insight. Most companies never even think to compare external messaging against hiring data.

Tools like Claude Code make this kind of multi-source analysis practical for small teams. You do not need a department. You need a process and a few well-built prompts.

The philosophical point underpinning all of this: business intelligence is not about predicting the future. It is about seeing the present more clearly than your competitors do. AI simply widens the aperture.

Widens the aperture. Also widens the paranoia. Once you start watching everyone, you start second-guessing every move.