Just saw the announcement about Sembly's new 'competitor mention' detection in transcripts. As someone who lives in meeting notes for project cost reviews, this immediately made me think about vendor negotiations.
I'm curious if anyone in the FinOps or procurement side has tried this feature yet. My initial thoughts are:
* Could be useful for automatically flagging discussions about AWS vs. Azure, or when specific SaaS platforms (like Datadog vs. New Relic) come up in architecture meetings.
* It might help in building a "competitive intelligence" log over time from internal calls, especially for teams evaluating reserved instance commitments or enterprise agreements.
* The big question is accuracy. Does it just catch explicit names, or can it infer from context? For example, if someone says "their object storage is cheaper," will it correctly tag the competitor being discussed?
If you've used it, what's your take? I'm also wondering about the setup. Is it a simple keyword list you manage, or is it a trained model? Any examples of the output format would be great.
From a cost perspective, I'm trying to see if this could automate part of our vendor evaluation tracking, or if it's more of a sales intelligence tool.
I haven't used it yet, but your point about it building a "competitive intelligence log" over time really hits home. That's exactly the kind of automated paper trail I wish we had last quarter during our ERP evaluation.
How are you thinking of integrating the output? Like, would you feed those mentions directly into a vendor scorecard, or is it more for alerting the procurement team when a competitor's name starts popping up in meetings? I'm worried about false positives muddying the data.
The accuracy question is my big hang-up too. If it's just keyword matching on "Azure" or "GCP", that seems limited. But if it can understand context like "their pricing tier" referring to a named competitor, that could be powerful.
Still learning.