Analyze market conditions or trends
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
Software can pull the data, run the comparison and write up what it found. The accuracy depends almost entirely on whether it is wired into the real system of record rather than a stale copy, which is the problem the tools and auth layer exists to solve.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Analysis and evaluation work |
| Jobs that do it | 12 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Builders, Tools and auth |
| O*NET activity | Analyzing Data or Information (4.A.2.a.4) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 12 occupations that perform it.
- Monitor and analyze sales records, trends, or economic conditions to anticipate consumer buying patterns, company sales, and needed inventory.
- Monitor changes affecting supply and demand, tracking market conditions, price trends, or futures markets.
- Forecast and track marketing and sales trends, analyzing collected data.
- Collect and analyze relevant data to identify real estate market trends.
- Compare liquidity, profitability, and credit histories of establishments being evaluated with those of similar establishments in the same industries and geographic locations.
- Evaluate capital needs of clients and assess market conditions to inform structuring of financial packages.
- Monitor financial market trends to ensure that client plans are responsive.
- Analyze potential loan markets and develop referral networks to locate prospects for loans.
- Monitor or analyze market and environmental trends.
- Compile and study occupational, educational, and economic information to assist counselees in determining and carrying out vocational and educational objectives.
- Analyze details of sales territories to assess their growth potential and to set quotas.
- Track and analyze factors that affect price movement, such as trade policies, weather conditions, political developments, or supply and demand changes.
- Monitor competitors' sales activities by following their advertisements in newspapers or other media.
- Gather data on competitors and analyze their prices, sales, and method of marketing and distribution.
- Analyze trends in sales prices, construction costs, and rents, to assess property values or determine the accuracy of assessments.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for analysis and evaluation work, and what it costs.
Start in the assistant with an export of the real data, because the accuracy problem here is a stale copy rather than a weak model. Make, at $9 a month, is the cheapest way to put the pull on a schedule once the analysis is worth repeating.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
12 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Appraisers and Assessors of Real Estate
- Credit Analysts
- Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
- Environmental Economists
- Financial and Investment Analysts
- First-Line Supervisors of Non-Retail Sales Workers
- Loan Officers
- Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists
- Personal Financial Advisors
- Purchasing Agents, Except Wholesale, Retail, and Farm Products
- Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
- Wholesale and Retail Buyers, Except Farm Products
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Analyze market or industry conditions”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.