How AI Gives Industry News and Market Trends Monitoring an Edge

If you wish to understand a particular industry’s trends, supply-demand dynamics, and outlook, you will need to carry out intensive industry landscape research. 

In this four-part blog series, we’ll cover all that there is to know about performing market research in the Asian business context—from traditional sources of information to the latest technologies that can elevate the process and yield more informed decision-making. Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. 

Step-by-Step Guide for Industry Landscape Research

The following steps are key for building up a holistic understanding of an industry landscape, although additional steps may be required depending on the industry.

Step 1: Collate and review available industry reports to make a brief assessment of the market potential. Industry reports are essential for understanding how a particular industry in a particular country or region is performing and what direction it is heading in. The methodology for gauging an industry’s performance varies from publication to publication, so it’s best to include as many up-to-date reports as possible in your research. 

Step 2: Find out what regulations and government policies affect the industry. Investigate potential risks and opportunities created by the current geopolitical climate. First-hand information can usually be found on the websites of government bodies, but it is also important to monitor news networks to see how the story develops.   

Step 3: Identify potential customers in your target market and get to know them by searching for the latest news and data on consumer trends. As trends are constantly evolving, you will need to monitor the news closely to keep up with new developments.     

Step 4: Carry out a thorough competitor analysis. Identify the key players in your market and determine who your main competitors are. Conduct background research on these organisations. Some of the key things to look for include corporate profiles, recent economic performance data, stakeholder lists, and news about recent strategic moves.    

Like any other market research, the sheer volume of information required to conduct a thorough industry landscape research can be daunting and overwhelming if collected manually. Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) can bring a high degree of automation to these tasks, thereby streamlining the entire market research process.

Using AI to Search for Relevant News &  Reports 

In the past few years AI has emerged as a powerful tool for helping organisations streamline various processes.  According to a prediction by market intelligence provider International Data Corporation (IDC), AI-powered firms will be able to respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners at least one-third faster than their peers who are reliant on human intelligence by 2022.

AI can radically streamline the process of converting raw data into useful knowledge, thereby reducing the need for simple data processing. There are two key ways in which the technology can help researchers and business development teams explore relevant sources:

1. It adds speed and consistency

Intelligent machines can assist with newsgathering as they are able to scan articles much faster than a human reader can without needing to take breaks. They are also less prone to making errors when sorting data.

2. It understands context

AI understands the context of the search & your interest through structured machine learning processes.. At one time, a keyword search would throw up any results containing the keyword without understanding the intent of the search. Now, AI-driven semantic search takes into account context to deliver more relevant results.

In practice, this means that when you do a search for “apple”, the machine can determine whether you’re interested in the fruit or the company. Likewise, when monitoring news related to “automated driving”, AI-driven search allows you to find information about self-driving technology while filtering out other information related to the search query, such as news about car accidents.

AI-driven search also allows you to explore a particular topic by searching for related terms and phrases. For example, you can follow news about mergers and acquisitions by tracking words like “buy”, “stake”, “invest”, and “acquire”.

ScoutAsia uses these capabilities to make the process of researching and monitoring Asian markets easier and more cost-effective. With ScoutAsia, you are able to see detailed information on more than 1.8 million companies across 24 territories.  Similarly, we aggregate Asia-related business news and market data from 50 of the region’s best publications using cutting-edge machine learning, all on one easy-to-use platform. Customisable news monitoring AI machines known as “Scout AI” can search this information for you and automatically track the companies and market trends that you’re interested in.

Setting up customisable news alerts is straightforward. All you have to do is train a “Scout AI” to monitor your chosen topic by providing a short description and selecting 10 relevant and 10 irrelevant articles. The initial step only takes a few minutes and we have a team of machine learning experts on hand to help you build the right AI models and optimise their performance.

In the fourth and last part of this blog series, we’ll further demonstrate how ScoutAsia’s AI-powered functionalities enable timely access to relevant market news and trends by showing its action.