Crayon

A few months in, the maintenance on a home-built AI competitive tool starts to compound. Integrations break, source APIs change, models get deprecated, and all of it becomes the compete team's to fix. Tim Dillon, Head of GTM AI and Sales Enablement at AssetWatch® said it on our State of CI 2026 panel: "The technology is probably there to stand up version one of this. It is the ongoing maintenance you do not understand until you have had to deal with it." Standing up the tool is the easy part. Keeping it useful is a two-quarter, full-time job on its own. Crayon runs that layer, so the CI leader who was hired to run strategy is still focused on that in year two. Hear more on this from our panelists: https://lnkd.in/gxScqxEK

The share of competitive teams using AI to create content jumped from 25% to 80% in two years. That is more than three times the volume of AI-generated competitive material sitting in front of sellers, and it has created a new problem for the leaders responsible for it: how do they know the content is right? Lisa Gonzalez, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bloomerang, said it on our State of CI 2026 panel: "AI has made competitive intelligence easier to access, but the access and intelligence are not necessarily the same thing." The compete programs pulling ahead in 2026 will be the ones that trust their content enough to hand it to a rep in a live deal. That is what Crayon is built for. AI that builds content based on intel the CI team owns and stands behind, so every rep walks into their deals with the answers they can trust. Check out the recording here: https://lnkd.in/gxScqxEK

"Much better curated, insightful information that gets past the marketing spin." That's Aisling Conroy, who leads competitive intelligence at 8am, comparing two answers to the same question. One came from a general AI assistant pointed at the open web. The other came from her own stack, with Clozd win-loss interviews flowing into Crayon and Sparks pulling themes across all of it. The open web version knew what her competitors claim. Hers knew what buyers actually said. It's clear that gap keeps widening. Internal intelligence, the things reps, partners and events teams pick up, is a far bigger share of Aisling's program than it was two years ago, and none of it is sitting on a website waiting to be crawled. She joined Clozd's Jonathan Johnson to walk through how she built the program, from win-loss interviews to battlecards sized for a sales cycle that sometimes closes in one conversation. She also shares what she'd prioritize starting a CI function from zero, which she has now done three times. Check out the full webinar here: https://lnkd.in/g5trqTcs

The State of CI report is something the Crayon team looks forward to every year, and we're equally excited about the panel we have in store for the webinar. The report lays out what the best CI programs are doing, and this session is where four pros who actually do it turn those findings into a playbook you can run with. This year, on August 5, Shannon De Marco from Crayon is hosting four CI leaders we've learned a ton from: Eileen Bazin, Lisa Gonzalez, Tali Soroker (they/them) Soroker, and Tim Dillon. Come with a competitive deal on your mind and a question or two! Registration's in the comments 👇

The 2026 State of Competitive Intelligence is full of what the best programs do differently. On August 5th, four CI leaders join Shannon De Marco to talk through how they actually pull it off. Think of it as the conversation you'd want over coffee with someone a few steps ahead of you. Real programs, honest tradeoffs, and the decisions that ended up mattering for revenue. Joining the panel: - Eileen Bazin (Paychex) on running CI that informs strategy well beyond the sales team. - Lisa Gonzalez (Bloomerang) )on rethinking how CI works when AI is in every rep's hands. - Tali Soroker (they/them) Soroker (Contentful) on building CI that gets the whole GTM org, sales, CS, and product, feeling genuinely confident in competitive deals. - Tim Dillon (AssetWatch®) on driving adoption and capturing the frontline intel that never reaches the CRM. Whether you sit in CI, product marketing, sales, or anywhere across revenue, you'll walk away with something you can put to work this quarter. Save your seat below 👇

Sales teams shouldn’t spend more time digging for data than actually selling. With our expanded connectors for sales teams, reps can finally connect customer conversations, competitive intelligence, and enablement assets with internal context in one connected experience. ➡️ Fathom.ai, Granola, Otter.ai, and Zoom: Instantly fuse call transcripts and meeting summaries with internal product docs, engineering roadmaps, and historical deal notes to prep for next-step pitches in seconds. ➡️ Clari + Salesloft: Track revenue signals and deal progression grounded in real enterprise reality, helping reps accurately forecast and spot pipeline risks early. ➡️ Crayon: Combine external battlecards and competitive intelligence with internal pricing sheets and product matrices to defeat objections on the fly. ➡️ Showpad: Surface the exact enablement collateral, case studies, and pitch decks required for a deal, mapped precisely to the prospect’s current pain points. By unifying customer history, product roadmaps, and external intelligence into one connected experience, sales teams can stop missing signals and start closing. https://lnkd.in/g-MpkPcT

Your reps already search Glean. Now they find your competitive intelligence there too. Crayon's new Glean connector indexes your battlecards and competitive insights directly into the Glean platform. This means a rep can ask Glean a competitive question in the middle of a deal and get an immediate answer -grounded in your team's own intel. The Crayon team is so excited to bridge the gap between our rich market and pipeline insights and your company's unique internal knowledge base with this partnership. See how it works 👇 https://lnkd.in/ginMwSpe

It's here. Every year, Crayon asks hundreds of competitive intelligence and revenue leaders how they actually build their programs, and every year the patterns get sharper. The 2026 State of Competitive Intelligence is the clearest yet, because this time the data doesn't just describe the state of CI. It shows what works. Six chapters take you from where the market is heading to a blueprint you can run: how competitive the landscape has become, how to structure a program that proves its value, why getting intel to sales on a weekly clock changes everything, and how teams are putting AI to work inside real deals, not just content. Here's what we love about this year's data: the moves that matter most are specific and doable. Track a metric that ties to revenue. Get a sponsor in sales. Tighten your cadence. Put AI to work in the deal. You can start any of them this quarter. The full 2026 State of Competitive Intelligence is live now, alongside a one-minute grader to see where your program stands today, and where to take it next. Give it a read, then tell us the one move you're making this quarter. Link in the comments. 👇

Last chance to join us for mining that competitive gold!