With LLMs now widely accessible, many CI and product marketing leaders are asking:

“Should we build our own AI-powered competitive intelligence tool?”

It’s a fair question. If AI can summarize content, analyze win/loss notes, and draft a battlecard, why invest in a platform?

But here’s the hard truth: building an AI wrapper is not the same as building a competitive enablement engine that drives revenue outcomes.

What "Building It Yourself" Usually Looks Like 

When teams say they want to build their own AI-driven CI solution, it typically means:

• Connecting a few data sources
  
  
• Feeding content into an LLM
  
  
• Prompting it to summarize or generate deliverables
  
  
• Pushing outputs into Slack or a shared drive

At first glance, this seems viable. But over time, the cracks appear. Below are three critical areas where DYI falls short.

1. Data Fragmentation 

Competitive intelligence doesn't live in one place. It spans: 

• The digital footprint (websites, messaging, pricing, reviews, content)
  
  
• Intel from buyers (win/loss interviews)
  
  
• Intel from sellers (Slack threads, field intel)
  
  
• Intel from deals (call recordings, CRM data)

Most DIY solutions over-index on competitor websites (the digital footprint) since they’re easy to crawl, but this coverage can decay quickly as competitors redesign pages, change URLs, shift messaging, etc.

Example: Website change detection 

DIY solutions may scrape a webpage, but they can't reliably detect what changed, when it changed, or why it matters over time. If a competitor sunsets a key feature, a DIY solution will miss that, but Crayon will visually show the before/after website change from a competitor and preserve it as competitive evidence over time.

Additionally, there are intel sources a DYI solution simply can't access or maintain whereas a purpose-built competitive enablement platform like Crayon automatically captures 100+ intelligence types, combining external and internal data sources. 

Example: Field intelligence

DIY solutions can't mine Teams or Salesforce notes to extract competitive intelligence. If a sales rep shares a competitor proposal in Teams, DIY solutions can't separate this from other messages or reliably extract the competitive relevance. 

2. The Synthesis Challenge 

Even if you aggregate data from your competitive landscape, you still have to make sense of it, and CI teams are drowning in signals. In fact, Crayon processes millions of competitive insights per year.

This is where most internal AI builds stall. DIY solutions can be noisy because they capture raw information without competitive pre-processing.

Crayon on the other hand leverages competitive signal mining to both isolate and extract CI, separating the signal from the noise.

3. Reactive Enablement  

Successful compete programs have high levels of sales team adoption. It's all about getting intel into reps' hands.

DIY solutions rely almost entirely on a “pull model” where users have to stop what they’re doing, ask a question, and hope the right prompt yields the right answer. Translation = reactive enablement. 

In contrast, Crayon supports a push AND pull model:

Push 

• Custom analysis gets pushed to reps via their workflows (Slack, email, etc)

Pull 

• Reps can ask Crayon Answers a question and will get an answer from continuously up-to-date and 100% validated intelligence.

With Crayon competitive enablement is embedded into existing sales workflows and systems (proactively!) to increase adoption.

So, When does it make sense to build? 

If you: 

Have a small sales team, only track a few competitors, don’t need revenue attribution, are comfortable maintaining data pipelines and AI infrastructure, don’t require deep integrations across CRM, conversational intelligence, Slack, and enablement tools

…then a lightweight internal solution might be sufficient.

But if you’re serious about driving competitive win rates at scale, you don’t just need AI.

You need:

• Real-time intelligence from buyers, sellers, and deals
  
  
• A core analysis engine to solve the synthesis problem
  
  
• Multi-channel enablement embedded in the sales tech stack
  

That's not a tool, that's a platform.  

If your curious to see how a purpose-built CI platform can help your sales team win more head-to-head competitive deals, check out this 2 minute Crayon Product Tour.