How to calculate the ROI of competitive intelligence in your company

Return on Investment (ROI) is a familiar concept for any area of the business. However, when it comes to the Intelligence Function —responsible for monitoring competitors, customers, regulations, technologies, and trends— measuring its impact is not always straightforward. The benefits are often indirect, much like team training: it is not easy to isolate which specific part of the budget generated a given result.

Even so, the experience of companies and academic studies points to one key fact: Competitive Intelligence delivers measurable strategic value. Organisations with solid intelligence processes, reinforced by professional tools, achieve better decisions, greater foresight and, ultimately, stronger business performance.

There are three main approaches to calculating the return on investment of the Intelligence Function:

1. Calculating productivity gains by digitalising processes
2. Increasing the effectiveness of strategic decisions and reducing risks
3. Enhancing intellectual capital and interdepartmental collaboration

Let’s take a closer look at each of these approaches:

1. ROI based on efficiency: how digitalising competitive intelligence boosts productivity

This measures how much time and cost is saved thanks to the automation of tasks such as searching, filtering, and distributing information. In other words: analysts spend far less time on repetitive tasks and more on generating strategic knowledge. In practice, without specialised tools, only about 25% of analysts’ time creates value, whereas with competitive intelligence software that figure can rise to over 90%.

This translates into:

• Savings in staff hours (e.g. a 95% reduction in time spent reviewing irrelevant information).
• Reduced costs for external consultancy or redundant sources.

It is the easiest approach to quantify and the one that best resonates with the idea of productivity.

A software solution should turn the limited dedication of each person monitoring their area of expertise (customers, technology, etc.) into a source of strategic value, multiplying the productivity of time invested by 3 or 4, and generating both tangible economic impacts (savings of millions in investments, opportunities detected before the competition) and strategic ones (cross-departmental alignment, regulatory anticipation, risk reduction).

The current problem: low productivity in monitoring

In most companies that have not digitalised the intelligence function, there is no formal monitoring process due to the high cost in hours it would entail: the business simply runs on information arriving organically (personal contacts, conferences, a newsletter here and there). Moreover, this information remains fragmented and is not actionable in decision-making.

Even in companies that do monitor the environment, analysts dedicate only a small part of their working day (between 30 minutes and an hour), usually limited to manual searches, Google Alerts and scattered newsletters – methods that are inefficient and of low impact:

• Less than 25% of this time becomes useful knowledge for the company.
• The rest is lost in manually reviewing scattered results, irrelevant information, or material disconnected from the company’s objectives, and without the ability to personalise by analyst or department.

How the scenario changes with a specialised software solution

It radically transforms this limited dedication:

• With advanced support, an analyst can dedicate about 40 minutes a day effectively, because they are working directly with filtered signals relevant to their topics of interest.
• The jump in productivity goes from 25% to 90% of useful time, multiplying the value generated in that same period by 3.6.
• The software automates 95% of repetitive effort, freeing the analyst to focus on analysis and the creation of knowledge.

ROI calculation (with 40 minutes daily dedication)

Using a reference cost of €60,000 per year per analyst (direct and indirect costs) and a daily dedication of 40 minutes (≈150 hours/year):

Practical ROI: 40 minutes daily dedication

Impact on a team of 5 analysts: over €16,000 annually in high-value time available, simply by optimising daily dedication (40 minutes).

2. ROI based on effectiveness: impact on strategic decisions and business results

The literature identifies typical benefits of intelligence as: entering a market at the right time, halting a project that lagged behind the competition, or anticipating regulation that will change the rules of the game. Although direct monetary valuation is complex, these cases allow the return to be illustrated tangibly.

This approach seeks to quantify how intelligence enables companies to:

• Enter the right market at the right time. For example, a Catalan services company monitored the competitive and regulatory environment of several candidate countries, choosing the best option and minimising internationalisation risks.

• Review a strategic investment. A packaging company reoriented an investment in production capacity and estimated a positive impact of more than £1 million, while creating a new product line aligned with emerging customer needs.

• Develop more resilient innovation. Monitoring disruptive technologies and competitors’ innovation activities and alliances helps avoid late or erroneous innovation decisions.

• Anticipate a regulation that will change the rules of the game. Tracking legislative projects gives companies more time to adapt products and processes.

• Avoid losses. Capturing early warnings in the supply chain can reduce costs and provide an advantage over competitors.

• Seize sales opportunities before competitors. For example, an ICT company detected early signals of potential clients’ projects months before they formally recognised their needs.

Here, the metric is no longer just time saved, but the value of decisions made thanks to information.

Within this approach, indirect methods of measuring impact can also be considered, such as assessing the extent of deployment and the “demand” for intelligence from stakeholders (Sales, Management, the Board, etc.).

3. Extended ROI (intellectual capital and collaboration)

This third approach includes more intangible, yet highly powerful benefits:

• Better interdepartmental collaboration. Combining distributed knowledge across departments (innovation, product, sales, etc.) generates huge synergies. This, which is so difficult in any company, is greatly facilitated with a collaborative competitive intelligence environment.

• Reduced organisational blind spots. We minimise unpleasant surprises that hit the business but could have been monitored from the outset — whether competitor alliances, legislative projects or disruptive technologies.

• Empowered management team with an integrated view of the market. By incorporating the interpretative capacity of the team’s experts collectively, leaders gain a more holistic vision.

This approach highlights how the intelligence function contributes to organisational resilience and capacity for innovation, which can also be linked to metrics such as:

• Speed of reaction to regulatory changes.
• Number of business areas involved.
• Number of opportunities detected through internal sources.

Final thought

The ROI of Competitive Intelligence is not measured only in euros saved, but also in your company’s ability to anticipate, collaborate and make better decisions. The real return combines efficiency, effectiveness and organisational resilience.

Ultimately, measuring the ROI of Competitive Intelligence is not an accounting exercise, but a way of demonstrating how this function transforms the company’s capacity to survive and grow in an uncertain environment.

What matters is to adapt the model to your reality, combine quantitative and qualitative metrics, and communicate clearly to management the value generated by the Intelligence Function.

At Antara, we believe measuring ROI is a crucial step in consolidating the function within the company. This is why we provide both the calculation template and other resources in our Academy.