Most people already know Claude can summarize a document. Far fewer use it for the job that actually pays off: keeping tabs on competitors and staying current in your industry without losing a Saturday to it.

The difference between a useless AI research session and a genuinely useful one comes down to one thing — what you feed it and what shape you ask the answer to come back in. Here are two things you can do this week that work.

Tip 1: The Competitor Teardown — force the answer into a fixed grid

The mistake almost everyone makes is asking something like “tell me about my competitor XYZ Company.” You get four paragraphs of vague description that could apply to anybody, and you have no idea which parts are real.

Do this instead. Go to the competitor’s website and copy their actual words — the pricing page, the About page, the homepage headline, their last two or three press releases or blog posts. Paste that raw text into Claude. Then give it a grid to fill in:

I’ve pasted text taken directly from a competitor’s website below. Using ONLY what is in this text, fill in this table:

1. Who they are clearly targeting (job title, company size, industry)
2. What they charge, and how the pricing is structured
3. The three claims they lead with most often
4. The words and phrases they repeat
5. What they never mention at all

If something is not in the text I gave you, write “not stated” instead of guessing. Then give me one short paragraph on where I might have room to compete.

Line 5 is the one that earns its keep. What a competitor leaves out is usually where they are weak — no pricing anywhere, no mention of support, nothing about implementation time, no customer names. Those gaps are your opening. And by telling Claude to write “not stated” rather than guess, you keep the output honest instead of confidently made up.

Run the same prompt against three competitors and paste all three tables into one document. Now you have a real comparison instead of a vibe.

Tip 2: Turn a pile of industry news into a ranked 90-day list

Everyone saves articles. Almost nobody goes back and reads them. Here is how to turn that pile into something you’d actually act on.

Once every week or two, drop ten or twelve items into a single document — headlines, newsletter blurbs, LinkedIn posts, whatever you flagged. Don’t clean it up. Then ask:

Below are items I collected from my industry over the past few weeks. Please:

1. Group them into no more than five themes, and name each theme in plain English
2. Rank the themes by how much they change what I should be doing in the next 90 days — most urgent first
3. For each theme, note how many separate sources mention it
4. Flag anything that only ONE source is claiming, so I know it isn’t confirmed yet
5. End with three specific things I should consider doing, and skip anything generic

Point 4 is what makes this trustworthy. One loud article is not a trend. When Claude separates “five different people are saying this” from “one person is saying this,” you stop chasing noise. Point 2 is what makes it useful — a summary tells you what happened, a ranked 90-day list tells you what to do Monday.

Keep the output in one running document and add to it each time. After a couple of months you can see which themes kept climbing and which quietly disappeared. That pattern is worth more than any single summary.

One rule that makes both of these work

Claude is far more reliable when it is working from material you handed it than when it is working from memory. Paste the source text in. Tell it to say “not stated” when something isn’t there. Ask it to point back to which item a claim came from. Do those three things and the output goes from “interesting” to “I can put this in front of my boss.”

Want to go deeper? Join me live

I’m teaching a live session on exactly this:

Using Claude to Research Competitors & Summarize Industry Trends
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 — 3:00 PM Eastern

We’ll build the competitor teardown prompt together from scratch, set up a repeatable trend digest you can run every week, and go through how to structure your source material so Claude gives you specifics instead of generalities. It’s live, so you can ask questions as we go — and yes, you can bring your own competitor and we’ll run it right there.

Full details and registration are on my site: PCWebinars.com

Plenty more coming up this month

This is one of about thirty live sessions I’m running in September. A sample of what else is on the calendar:

Claude for Excel and Using Claude to be More Productive in Excel
Using ChatGPT with Excel and Using Copilot with Excel
ChatGPT vs Copilot vs Claude: The Best AI Tool for Your Business
Claude vs. ChatGPT: The Complete AI Comparison Guide
How to Use Claude for Data Analysis and Organization
Claude + Microsoft 365 and Claude for Non-Tech Professionals
Claude for HR, ChatGPT and Copilot for HR, and Claude for Customer-Facing Teams
Copilot and Project Management and ChatGPT and Copilot for Project Management
AI Tools for Administrative Professionals and ChatGPT and Copilot for Salespeople
Microsoft Power BI for Beginners & Excel Users, Mastering Power BI, and Using Copilot with Power BI
Excel Pivot Tables
Plus several 3-hour virtual seminars, including Using Claude To Be More Productive In Microsoft 365 and How to Use Claude AI Like a Pro: Complete Beginner to Advanced Guide

The full, current schedule is always at PCWebinars.com.

About your trainer

I’m Tom Fragale — a Microsoft Certified Trainer and computer professional based in the Philadelphia area. I’ve been teaching technology for more than 30 years and have trained over 30,000 people, from one-on-one coaching all the way up to large corporate rollouts.

My day-to-day is Excel, Power BI, Access, Microsoft 365, and now a great deal of AI work — ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude. I also build custom database and reporting applications, which means when I teach a tool I’ve usually had to make it work on a real deadline for a real client, not just in a demo.

My whole approach is practical. I don’t spend the hour on theory. I show you the thing, you try the thing, and you leave with something you can use that afternoon.

Questions, or want a session customized for your team? Head over to PCWebinars.com and get in touch. I’d be glad to help.

Using Claude to Research Competitors and Summarize Industry Trends