Use Cases: Competitive Intelligence, Market Research

From Tool to Strategic Lever

Deep Research only delivers value when applied to real-world scenarios. Competitive intelligence, market research, company analysis, regulatory monitoring, and solution benchmarking: these five use cases share the same mechanics—a precise context, a defined scope, and a required format. The prompts below are starting points. Customize them with your industry, geographic region, and specific profile. If you copy them verbatim, you’ll get a generic report that any competitor could have generated.

Know What Your Competitors Are Doing

The goal is to understand their positioning, strengths, weaknesses, and recent moves. Your prompt should name specific players and enforce a common framework:

“Conduct a competitive analysis of [your industry] in France for 2026. Focus on the following players: [Competitor A], [Competitor B], [Competitor C]. For each, analyze: their positioning, recent product launches, pricing strategy, recent hiring activity, and funding rounds. Present the results as a comparison table followed by a SWOT analysis for each competitor.”

You’ll get a structured table, an interpretation of recent strategic moves, and verifiable sources—press articles, press releases, and public profiles. Precision in your criteria makes all the difference. Asking to “analyze their recent hiring activity” yields an actionable signal, whereas “tell me about their team” just produces a paraphrase of the “About Us” page.

Evaluate a Market

Here, you’re looking for market size, dynamics, and entry points. Your prompt must list the required sections, or some will be missing:

“Conduct a market study on [your market] in [geographic region] for 2026. Include: market size in revenue, annual growth rate, segmentation by customer type, emerging trends, barriers to entry, and opportunities for a new entrant. Cite analyst reports (Gartner, McKinsey, Statista, etc.) where available.”

Explicitly requesting recognized analysts changes the nature of the sources Deep Research selects. It often finds excerpts from publicly available reports, which carry far more weight than a blog post. Keep in mind, however, that market estimates vary by firm. What you get is a well-argued range, not a single definitive figure.

Build a Company Dossier

Before a partnership, investment, or hiring decision, you need a quick but complete profile—and especially the negative signals no one will volunteer spontaneously:

“Create a complete profile of the company [name]. Include: founding date, founders, estimated revenue, number of employees, main products/services, notable clients, funding rounds, recent news, and reputation (Glassdoor reviews, press articles). Flag any red flags or controversies.”

That last sentence is the key. Without it, the summary tends toward the flattering portrait a company paints of itself.

Monitor Regulations, Compare Solutions

For regulatory work, the report’s value lies in its legal granularity and source quality. Using Sites > Manage sites, you can prioritize official sources like EUR-Lex or Légifrance (the official French government portal for laws and regulations), or even limit the search to those sites. For each identified text, ask for the reference, effective date, created obligations, potential penalties, and required actions. Demand a priority ranking; otherwise, you’ll get a flat list where urgent items sit alongside trivial ones:

“What are the new European and French regulations affecting [your industry] in 2026? For each regulation, specify: the reference text, effective date, obligations for companies, penalties for non-compliance, and actions to take. Rank by priority.”

When choosing a tool or vendor, apply benchmarking logic: “Compare solutions [A], [B], and [C] for [your need]. Comparison criteria: features, pricing, integrations, customer support, user reviews, market share. Present as a table with a reasoned recommendation for a company of [your profile].” The final recommendation only makes sense if you define the profile. The best tool for a ten-person startup is rarely the right fit for a thousand-person enterprise.

Your Turn

Your turn. Pick the use case closest to your work and run the search with the adapted prompt. Evaluate the report using the three-pass method. Identify three pieces of information you didn’t know, verify two key sources, then ask: “Rephrase this analysis for a presentation to the executive committee.” Finally, request the references for the cited reports so you can consult them if anyone asks where a figure came from.

For dossiers that also involve internal documents, Deep Research can build on your imported files and compatible connected apps like Google Drive or SharePoint. It accesses them in read-only mode, respecting your account and workspace permissions.

Official sources: Deep research in ChatGPT (OpenAI Help Center)

Key Takeaways

• Deep Research excels at competitive intelligence, market research, company analysis, and regulatory monitoring
• A structured prompt with context, scope, and format produces immediately actionable reports
• Always customize template prompts with your industry, geographic region, and company profile
• Verify key figures and trace them back to primary sources
• Rephrase reports to adapt them to your internal audience