New Data: Your Competitors Are Talking About AI 5x More Than They Did In 2022

For the data presented in this blog post to make sense, you need some background on Crayon.

Crayon is a competitive intelligence platform. Our customers use our technology to monitor their competitors’ online activity. 24/7/365, Crayon crawls the public web and captures things like:

• Website changes
• Customer reviews
• Job postings
• Blog posts
• News articles

You name it, Crayon captures it. In fact, everything captured by Crayon is stored in a searchable database. So, for example, if you want to see every blog post published by your competitors that contains the keyword “payments,” Crayon can surface those blog posts instantaneously.

Now, this is where things get interesting.

As you’ve probably noticed, AI has been an extremely hot topic this year. In the fall of 2022, things were business as usual—and then all of a sudden, our LinkedIn feeds were overrun with 25-year-old grifters claiming to be ChatGPT experts and B2B tech companies announcing new “AI-powered” features.

The race was on. Entering 2023, seemingly every company saw AI as an opportunity to seize competitive advantage. The result was a massive increase in the volume of AI-related content on the internet.

A few days ago, my coworkers and I started to wonder: Exactly how massive was that increase? If we compare the insights that Crayon captured in August 2022 to the insights that it captured in August 2023, how much of an increase will we see in AI-related insights?

The answer: a 432% increase. That’s a fivefold increase. A quintupling.

To calculate that number, we randomly selected 116 of our customers, all of them B2B software companies. Then, we went through them one-by-one and reviewed their competitors’ online activity in August 2022. In total, we found 9,682 insights that contained AI-related keywords.

(Again, an “insight” could be a blog post, a job posting, a change in website copy, etc.)

Then, using that same sample of 116 customers, we reviewed their competitors’ online activity in August 2023. In total, we found 51,494 insights that contained AI-related keywords.

(51494 - 9682) ÷ 9682 = 4.32. That’s a 432% year-over-year increase.

At the low end of the spectrum, one of our customers, a crisis management software company, saw a modest 50% increase in AI-related insights across their competitive landscape.

(Let that sink in. A 50% increase is modest. That’s how obsessed we’ve become with AI.)

At the high end of the spectrum, another customer, an engineering intelligence platform, saw a whopping 3,850% increase in AI-related insights across their competitive landscape.

I could share more examples, but you get the point: In 2023, AI has dominated the conversation in every subcategory of the B2B software industry.

If you're having trouble keeping tabs on what your competitors are saying/doing as it relates to AI, Crayon can help. Not to get too meta, but I suggest watching the 2-minute video you see below, which explains how Crayon AI makes it easy to capture and summarize critical competitive insights.