Instant Competitor Launch Analysis

Summarized by WRITER

• 20 minutes replaces days of work: A single marketer can now research competitors, analyze video launches, and build interactive dashboards—tasks that previously required web developers and multiple days.
• Playbooks extend beyond prompts: By embedding skills as Markdown files and connecting to apps natively, Playbooks give agents powerful capabilities like video transcription and structured data analysis.
• Web research meets multimedia analysis: The agent pulls fresh launch data, extracts audio from competitor videos, runs speech-to-text, and synthesizes insights automatically.
• Interactive dashboards, not static reports: Final output is a dynamic web dashboard with built-in skills ensuring consistent quality, plus on-demand views at user request.

Here’s the scenario: It’s the first week of the new year, and your company is at CES in Las Vegas getting ready to unveil its latest gadget. Of course, all your competitors are there as well. Your boss says the CEO wants a report on his desk by the end of the week analyzing everything your competition launched, where your product stands by comparison, and what steps you’ll take to ensure your firm stays ahead of the pack.

In this week’s video, we highlight our Competitive Launch Analysis Playbook, a set of instructions for an agent that can research the web, understand content from videos, and craft an interactive dashboard that lays out exactly what your competition did, how your current marketing and presentation stack up, and how to close any gaps. In the past, this would have taken days of work and required support from a web developer. Now, a single marketer can get this done in 20 minutes or less.

As a quick refresher, Playbooks are a key feature of WRITER’s AI platform. They are where you craft and store instructions for your AI agents. A Playbook, like a prompt, is a detailed plan written in plain text, but it includes several built-in tools that make it far more powerful than a well-crafted prompt alone.

With Playbooks, you can natively connect to your apps and services so the agent can pull relevant data into its context window or write files and send messages wherever it’s most convenient for you. For this Playbook, the key feature is the ability to integrate skills directly into the prompt as attached Markdown files.

The competitive analysis agent asks you to provide the key URLs for the competitors and products you’re concerned about. It conducts its own web research, ensuring it pulls only fresh data from the launch time window. If a competitor’s product launch includes a YouTube video showcasing the features of its latest gizmo, this agent uses a skill, included in the Playbook as a Markdown file, that can extract audio from a web video, run it through a speech-to-text model, and analyze the results.

The final output this agent delivers is not a written report but an interactive web dashboard. To ensure consistent quality in this rich deliverable, a set of skills is embedded in the Playbook, instructing the agent on how to build and organize the dashboard. Once a run is complete, the agent can quickly provide additional views or configurations at the user’s request.

Check out the video below for a full walkthrough of this Playbook, analyzing a hypothetical robotic butler company against its competition, complete with some very believable robots pouring my coffee and dusting my shelves.