Monitor market conditions or trends
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
A scheduled check against a live source, with an alert when something moves, is one of the cheapest things on this page to automate, and software will watch far more indicators than a person can hold in their head. What it does not do is notice the thing nobody thought to watch for, or decide that a reading is worth acting on.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Monitoring and oversight |
| Jobs that do it | 9 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Builders, Tools and auth |
| O*NET activity | Monitoring Processes, Materials, or Surroundings (4.A.1.a.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 9 occupations that perform it.
- Monitor or analyze market and environmental trends.
- Estimate consumer demand and determine the types and amounts of goods to be sold.
- Monitor markets or positions.
- Attend sales or trade meetings or read related publications to obtain information about market conditions, business trends, regulations, or industry developments.
- Attend sales or trade meetings or read related publications to obtain information about market conditions, business trends, environmental regulations, or industry developments.
- Monitor market conditions, product innovations, and competitors' products, prices, and sales.
- Maintain awareness of current income tax regulations, local zoning, building and tax laws, and growth possibilities of a property's area.
- Keep informed on industry news and trends, products, services, competitors, relevant information about legacy, existing, and emerging technologies, and the latest product-line developments.
- Conduct client or market surveys to obtain information about potential customers.
- Track and analyze factors that affect price movement, such as trade policies, weather conditions, political developments, or supply and demand changes.
- Monitor market conditions, innovations, and competitors' services, prices, and sales.
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 monitoring and oversight, and what it costs.
Monitoring is a scheduled check plus an alert, which is the cheapest thing on this site to build: Make from $9 a month, or n8n for nothing if you host it yourself. A dedicated monitoring product is very rarely worth the line item.
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.
Who does this work
9 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Environmental Economists
- First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers
- Real Estate Brokers
- Sales Engineers
- Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products
- Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
- Telemarketers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Monitor external affairs, trends, or events”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Monitor current trends | 11 |
| Monitor external affairs or events affecting business operations | 8 |
| Monitor external factors impacting operations | 1 |
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.