The Challenge: Intelligence Overload, Action Starved
The global Strategy & Marketing Intelligence team, led by Jonathan Quick at Lenovo, supports high-stakes decisions every day. Whether it’s adapting to supply chain risks, navigating through regulatory shifts, or responding to competitor acquisitions that can reshape their market position, their role is to stay one step ahead. However, rather than focusing on analysis, the team was overwhelmed by information overload.
“We were going through hundreds of sources daily to find that one piece of critical information,” Jonathan recalled. “Compiling and sending weekly newsletters to different teams alone took nearly 10 hours per week, delaying insights delivery by a full business day,” he added.
Even though Jonathan’s team had access to information, they spent nearly 30% of their time just aggregating data and converting them into actionable insights. The bigger risk? Missing critical market signals leading to lost business opportunities. The team needed to move from manual collection to a more strategic method.
The Evaluation: Choosing the Right Intelligence Partner
Jonathan’s team at Lenovo wasn’t just looking to add another software tool to their already vast tech stack. They sought a strategic partner capable of providing answers to some key, fundamental questions and elevating their strategic capabilities.
- Can the platform go beyond collecting data and accelerate insight generation?
- Does the tool auto-summarize complex reports and present what matters?
- Will it reduce our manual overhead cost and cut through the noise?
- Can it seamlessly fit into our existing workflow without creating operational silos?
- Is the vendor support team hands-on and consultative?
After evaluating many market and competitive intelligence (M&CI) tools, Jonathan and his team found the partner that checked all their boxes: Contify.
The Solution: From Data Slog to Strategic Flow
Following comprehensive platform demos and multiple discussions with the Contify team, Jonathan saw how Contify could transform their current, manually-driven process into intelligent workflows.
“We share very specific concerns and the Contify team had solutions at their fingertips. Moreover, their quick support and weekly check-ins made it clear we weren’t just buying an M&CI tool, we were getting a committed partner, ” said Jonathan.
With Contify, Lenovo’s strategy team unlocked:
- AI-powered bulk summarization to reduce their research time
- Athena AI’s Ask Athena to get real-time answers to many business-specific questions
- Global & curated newsfeeds that aligned with Lenovo’s taxonomies and focus areas
- The Key Updates hub for easy internal collaboration
- Newsletter builder to reduce newsletter creation and dissemination time by 75%
- Smart alerts to proactively track competitor activities, customer expectations, and market shifts
The result? Jonathan’s team spent more time analyzing data rather than just aggregating it.
“With Ask Athena, we can now deep dive into specific topics, get answers to critical business questions, and even validate assumptions with data-based insights. It has elevated our confidence in strategic discussions and planning.” Jonathan added.
The Impact: From manual grind to measurable gains
Within six months of leveraging Contify M&CI solution, Lenovo witnessed tangible improvements.
- 3 hours saved per analyst per day by eliminating data scrubbing and manual summarization process
- 40% reduction in initial research time
- Analysts now spent 25% more time on strategic thinking and interpretation
- The strategic decision cycle improved by 15%, owing to faster access to insights
- Newsletter turnaround time reduced by 75%, improving stakeholder communication and decision-making prowess.
