10 AI Automations Your Competitors Deployed Last Quarter

You're Buying AI "Grease". You Need AI "Cogs"

Most mid-market AI investments are "Grease"—tools that make employees 10% faster. ChatGPT seats. AI lead scoring. Summarization features.

Grease speeds up one person. It doesn't change the machine.

"Cogs" are different. A Cog is an autonomous AI automation that replaces a workflow entirely. It runs 24/7. No prompting. No supervision. It monitors, acts, and reports back while your team sleeps.

The difference in practice:

Grease: Your team uses AI to write the weekly competitor report faster. Still takes 3 hours because someone checks 12 websites, pulls the data, formats it.

Cog: An autonomous system checks those 12 websites at 6am daily. Pricing changes? Your sales team knows before their first call. No human touched it. The 3-hour task now takes zero—and it runs 7 days a week.

That's not 10% efficiency. That's 10x leverage.

Here are 10 Cogs running at mid-market companies right now.

Operations Cogs

1. The Supplier Risk Monitor

Watches SEC filings, job postings, news, industry chatter—and correlates them. One logistics CEO knew about a key supplier's financial trouble six weeks before they announced restructuring. He had two alternates sourced while competitors were still getting the news.

2. The Contract Renewal Tracker

Flags upcoming renewals, pulls actual usage data, identifies contracts worth renegotiating, drafts talking points for procurement. One company recovered $340K in year one from contracts they would have auto-renewed without review.

Competitive Intelligence Cogs

3. The Pricing Watchdog

Monitors pricing pages of your top 20 competitors daily. When someone drops their Pro tier by 20% or restructures their Enterprise package, you know within hours. One distribution company caught a competitor's price change in 6 hours. Previously? They found out from customers asking for price matches.

4. The Competitor Shadow

Monitors your top 10 competitors continuously—pricing, job postings, press releases, social accounts—and correlates signals. Three new ML engineering roles + a "Head of AI" posting + blog silence = they're building something. You know what's coming before their customers do.

Sales Cogs

5. The Cold Email Researcher

Finds decision-makers at target accounts. Reads their last 20 LinkedIn posts, company announcements, and recent job listings. Generates hyper-personalized emails: "I noticed you're hiring for X and your last quarter report mentioned Y." One sales team went from 40 personalized emails/week to 200 with higher response rates.

6. The Lead Signal Spotter

Monitors Reddit, LinkedIn, Slack communities, industry forums for buying signals. "Looking for ERP recommendations for food manufacturing" is a lead—if you see it before it's three weeks old. Shows up as a helpful response from someone who happens to have built exactly what they need.

Customer Success Cogs

7. The Review Responder

Monitors G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Google, Twitter. Positive review? Auto-thanks within 2 hours, extracts the quote for sales collateral, adds reviewer to your champions list. Negative review? Drafts empathetic response for approval, alerts the right team, logs the issue. Response time dropped from 48 hours to under 2.

8. The Churn Signal Detector

Monitors product usage patterns, support ticket sentiment, engagement trends. Flags accounts showing early warning signs before they start shopping alternatives. One company saved $180K ARR in the first quarter by intervening while there was still time.

9. The Support-to-Roadmap Pipeline

Analyzes support tickets for patterns. "40% of tickets this month mention confusion about the export function." That's your next help article, product fix, and training priority—written by actual customer pain, not internal guessing.

Business Development Cogs

10. The Partnership Scout

Finds companies serving your audience that aren't competitors. Analyzes their content for partnership signals. Generates co-marketing pitches: "I noticed you wrote about [topic] and we have complementary data—want to co-author a report?" Three partnership deals closed in 90 days from opportunities that wouldn't have surfaced manually.

The Math: Why Cogs Deliver 10x Leverage

A senior analyst costs $85K/year and works 40 hours a week. They take PTO. They have other priorities. They can realistically monitor maybe 5 competitors thoroughly.

A Cog costs 10% of that analyst's salary. It monitors 50 competitors, 24/7, 365 days. It never gets pulled into a "quick project." It never forgets to check.

You're not replacing the employee. You're giving them leverage.

The work that took 20 hours now takes zero, and your analyst spends that time on judgment calls and strategy instead of data gathering.

That's 10x leverage.

Before You Build: Data Readiness

Cogs fail when companies skip the foundation. Before deploying any autonomous AI automation, you need to audit your data for two things:

Legibility: Can the AI understand the logic of your business? Messy text files and loose notes won't cut it—you need structured data the AI can reason with.

Eligibility: Can the AI access the source? If your data lives in static PDFs or locked dashboards, you're asking your Cog to work with its hands tied.

We covered this in depth here: Why 61% of CEOs Are Burning Cash on "Weak AI"

The Bottom Line

The companies pulling ahead aren't buying AI tools. They're deploying autonomous AI automations that run while the team sleeps.

Most mid-market companies are still buying Grease—ChatGPT seats and efficiency features. That's table stakes. The leaders are building Cogs that deliver 10x leverage at 10% of the cost.

Your AI Department builds and manages AI Cogs. If you want to know which 2-3 would have the highest ROI for your operation, book a call. We'll tell you where to start and whether your data is ready to support it.

Book a 30-Minute Call