ATIDAN / CUSTOMER STORIES
Kerry Group turns public people signal into competitive intelligence
Atidan built Kerry Group a Claude-powered intelligence hub that replaced manual, profile-by-profile research with plain-language questions. It has cut the time Kerry's team spends on manual competitor research by more than 75 percent.
75%+
Reduction in time spent on manual competitor research, measured since the hub went into production, according to
Kerry's research team
In daily use by Kerry's growth and process excellence team. This is production, not a pilot or a proof of concept.
Single sign-on with role-based permissions for administrators and viewers across the organization.
Competitor, customer, and internal-expert intelligence, consolidated into one searchable interface with on-demand refresh.
THE CHALLENGE
Market signal existed. Reading it didn't scale.
Kerry Group is a global taste and nutrition company, and its commercial edge depends on knowing where the market is heading: which competitors are investing in which categories, which customers are signaling new innovation priorities, and which of Kerry's own scientists and technologists hold the expertise for a given opportunity.
Much of that signal is already public. Competitors, customers, and Kerry's own experts publish constantly about launches, research directions, sustainability commitments, and category bets. The problem was never availability. It was throughput.
Answering a single question, such as who at Kerry is most active on clean-label beverage innovation, meant an analyst opening profiles one at a time, reading recent posts, taking notes, and piecing patterns together by hand. The work was slow, inconsistent from one analyst to the next, impossible to repeat on demand, and stale almost as soon as it was finished. Because it was expensive, it happened rarely, so strategic decisions were often made against a picture of the market that was months old.
Kerry needed the same research to take minutes instead of days, produce a consistent answer no matter who asked, and stay current, without collecting anything a person hadn't chosen to publish.
THE SOLUTION
An intelligence hub, with Claude doing the reading
Atidan designed and delivered the Kerry People Intelligence Hub: a secure web application that ingests publicly available activity across Kerry employees, competitor organizations, and customer accounts, then puts Claude in front of it.
The architectural decision that made the system work was separating collection from reasoning. Public activity is ingested and structured on a schedule, or on demand when an administrator triggers a competitor refresh. Claude then works over that curated corpus rather than querying people live, which keeps responses fast, keeps the data footprint governed and auditable, and means every answer is drawn from a defined, reviewable body of content.
Claude handles the part of the job that used to consume an analyst's day: reading large volumes of posts and profiles, extracting the themes that matter, summarizing what a person or organization is actually talking about, and answering a plainly worded question with a structured, evidence-backed response.
How a question gets answered
- Sign in - The user authenticates through single sign-on. No separate credentials, no shadow account to manage.
- Search or browse - Kerry employees can be filtered by location, topic, or area of engagement.
- Ask in plain language - “Who at Kerry posts about clean-label beverages?" No query syntax, no filters to build.
- Claude answers from the corpus - It reads across the ingested public content and returns a structured summary with the underlying activity behind it.
- Administrators refresh coverage - Admins trigger competitor ingestion from the dashboard whenever a new organization needs to be brought into scope.
What teams use it for
| Use case | Representative question |
|---|---|
| Find internal experts | “Who in Kerry is most active on clean-label beverage innovation?” |
| Connect research to customers | “Which Kerry researchers align with our key beverage and QSR accounts?” |
| Track competitor focus | “What are competitor employees posting about in EMEA?” |
| Monitor launch signals | “Which strategic themes are trending across our competitor set?” |
| Assess thought leadership | “Which employees have the highest engagement on sustainability topics?” |
Scope drawn deliberately
Because the system reasons over people's professional activity, Atidan and Kerry set the boundaries before writing a line of code, and the platform enforces them.
- No private people data, private profiles, or personal contact details. Public activity only.
- No live querying of people by the assistant. Claude reads a governed, pre-ingested corpus.
- No bulk data export for end users.
- No sentiment scoring or predictive profiling of individuals.
Access is role-based. Administrators control ingestion, jobs, and configuration, while viewers get search, the assistant, post summaries, and dashboard metrics. Those constraints were a feature of the design, not a limitation of it. They're what made the platform straightforward to approve and roll out across the organization.
THE OUTCOME
Research that used to take days now takes a conversation
Since going live in production, Kerry's team has cut the time it spends on manual competitor research by more than 75 percent.
The change isn't only hours recovered. Because the cost of asking a question collapsed, the questions changed too. Research once reserved for major strategic reviews now happens in the flow of ordinary work: before a customer meeting, while scoping a new category, or the moment a competitor announcement lands. Analysis that once depended on which analyst ran it now returns a consistent, structured answer to anyone who asks.
The internal expert-finding capability turned out to be a benefit Kerry hadn't initially set out to buy. In a company Kerry's size and geographic spread, the fastest way to answer a technical customer question is often to find the colleague who already knows. The same index that tracks the market also makes Kerry's own expertise findable.
“Atidan has helped transform the way we approach competitive intelligence. The solution significantly reduces the time and effort required for research while providing actionable, data-driven insights into competitor activities. Since deployment in production, our team has achieved over 75% reduction in time spent on manual competitor research.
With intelligent data analysis and AI-powered capabilities using the advanced Claude frontier AI model, which provided excellent summarization and insight extraction, our team can quickly understand market and competitor trends and access relevant insights through natural-language interactions. What once required extensive manual effort can now be accomplished quickly and efficiently.
Atidan's team demonstrated strong expertise, professionalism, and commitment throughout the engagement. Their proactive approach and focus on delivering meaningful business value make Atidan a trusted partner for AI and technology innovation."
Head — Growth & Process Excellence, Kerry Group
WHY CLAUDE
Summarization quality was the deciding factor
The hub's usefulness rests on one thing: whether the summary a user reads is a faithful, useful reduction of hundreds of posts they'll never read themselves. A model that summarizes plausibly but imprecisely produces confident, wrong market intelligence, which is worse than no tool at all.
Atidan chose Claude for the quality of its summarization and insight extraction across long, unstructured, multi-author content, and for its ability to hold a natural-language conversation over that material without the user learning a query language. Claude's handling of extended context let the system reason across an entire organization's public activity in a single pass, rather than stitching fragments together.
ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP
Built by Atidan. Delivered to production.
Atidan Technologies designs, builds, and operates enterprise AI systems across the full lifecycle: strategy and use-case discovery, custom development, data engineering, deployment, and ongoing governance. The Kerry People Intelligence Hub was delivered end to end by Atidan, covering solution design, the ingestion pipeline, application and Claude integration, single sign-on and the role model, user acceptance testing, and production rollout.
If competitive research, expert discovery, or market monitoring is still happening profile by profile in your organization, the same pattern applies.