# Watching the market around the clock

> Proactive competitor monitoring

- **Year:** 2026
- **URL:** https://fse-group.de/en/unsere-arbeit/market-watch-agent

For a national energy supplier we built a Market Watch Agent that monitors the competition on Check24 and Verivox around the clock and reports every relevant movement straight into Microsoft Teams. What used to be occasional manual observation became continuous. The agent now runs at five energy suppliers.

The energy market moves fast. A competitor lowers the bonus, a new tariff climbs the Check24 ranking, and within days conversion rates shift.

At our customer, watching this market was done by hand. Someone opened the comparison portals, noted positions, compiled the results and passed them on. That cost time, and the figures were often out of date by the time they landed on the table. Adjustments to prices and placement therefore happened only a few times a year.

In phases of strong market movement in particular, this gap became expensive. Changes were only noticed once their effect was already visible in the sales figures.

### The challenge

More data was never the problem. The portals show everything anyway. It was about speed: seeing relevant changes early enough to still react. And the information had to arrive where the team already works, not in yet another dashboard nobody opens.

### The approach

We built an agent that walks the market itself at fixed intervals. It crawls competitor tariffs on Check24 and Verivox, checks them against a stored rule set and reports every match straight into Microsoft Teams.

Which events trigger an alert is defined by the business unit itself:

- a competitor overtakes you in the ranking

- a price falls below a set threshold

- a defined movement in a specific market segment

Monitoring therefore runs without anyone doing anything. Assessment and decision stay with the pricing team.

### The result

After just a few weeks manual monitoring was redundant. Instead of querying the market occasionally, the team had it in view continuously. Responsiveness rose from a few adjustments a year to several per week.

The Market Watch Agent now runs at five energy suppliers. Each maintains its own rule set and receives its own alerts.

### What really changed

The time saved was not even the biggest effect. With continuous transparency the team developed a feel for what such agents can do. One solution for market monitoring turned into a list of further ideas. The question was no longer whether an agent helps, but which process is next.

### Why this matters for other utilities

Most utilities already have the data. What is missing is the speed of evaluation. In a market that turns within days, speed decides. Whoever spots the one relevant movement early can still turn it into a decision. A proactive agent takes over the watching without tying up good people.

### System landscape & integrations

  Governance

  Oversight

  Market Watch
  Agent
  Autonomous · around the clock

  Value
  Instant alert
  on rule match
  Proactive, without delay

  LLM
  Relevance scoring

  Monitoring
  Run log

  Market price monitoring
  Crawling Check24 · Verivox

  Notification
  MS Teams

  Rule set
  Thresholds & alerts

  Human
  colleague
  Pricing-Team

### Market Watch Agent – live demo

Animation: on the left, several competitors publish new tariffs on Check24 and Verivox. The Market Watch Agent in the middle scans the market in a radar view against a stored rule set (for example target ranking and bonus threshold). As soon as a competitor triggers a rule (example municipal utility lowers its bonus and moves past into rank 2), the radar marks the match and sends the pricing team on the right an immediate alert in Microsoft Teams with a concrete recommended action.

While reports show yesterday’s market, an agent reports today’s movement — early enough to still react.

**Tags:** #MarketIntelligence #AIAgent #Competitor monitoring #Energy sector