Hand off complex, recurring work without compromise

Merciv Playbooks run your team’s recurring research, reporting, and deliverables exactly the way you set them, with every claim linked to its source. Available today for enterprise users.

Insights teams owe the business the same work on a cycle: the monthly business review, the competitor update, the brand pulse between tracker waves, the launch read. Each one means pulling the same sources, running the same analysis, rebuilding the same deck, and checking every number before it reaches leadership. Merciv Playbooks run that work the way your team does it, on a schedule or on demand, and link every claim in the output to its source.

How Playbooks work

A Playbook is a recurring process saved as a method: the data to pull, the analysis to run, the sources and brands to cover, and the deliverable at the end. You can start one in four ways:

• Repeat a process you ran in Merciv. Turn work you’ve already done and feedback you’ve already given into a repeatable process, using natural language.
• Work from your own documents. Upload your SOPs, past decks, templates and brand guidelines, and Merciv builds the Playbook from them, with your input, review and approval at every step.
• Build one from scratch. Take full control over every step of a workflow, from data collection and cleaning through synthesis, analysis, and reporting.
• Start with one of ours. Run one from Merciv’s library of 30+ Playbooks, built and tested by our team and the experts we work with.

You set the methodology and cadence once; Merciv repeats it for you. The finished deliverable gets made your way, every time.

The same method on every run

When you change a research workflow, you often change the findings and what they mean, too. That’s why consistency matters. Playbooks help you stop worrying about the setup and free you up to focus on why the findings matter to your business.

The process you outline, the sources you scope, and the analysis you run stay consistent in Merciv, so the only thing that changes from run to run is the input data, and with it the findings. When you edit the Playbook, we’ll keep a version history you can always come back to as you iterate.

Every claim links to its source

A Playbook can only cite sources it actually retrieved. Drill into any claim or finding, and you’ll see the data or source behind it. If there are pieces missing, Merciv will flag them, name the gap, and outline next steps to the relevant team members.

Get the full picture in one place

Stop wasting time pulling data together. A Playbook can draw on every source your team works from:

• Knowledge uploads: past research, decks, SOPs and files in your knowledge hub
• Synced connectors: 1,400+ integrations, from sales and BI data to shared drives
• MCP tools: direct connections to the systems your team already uses
• Brand and market data: reviews, social posts, product page data and search for your brands, portfolio and competitors, collected by Merciv every day
• Merciv artifacts: dashboards, reports and analyses from earlier runs
• The web: public sources, news and category coverage

What becomes possible

Any data-driven workflow or deliverable your team runs repeatedly can become a Playbook. Here are some examples:

• Insights: the monthly business review refreshed in your existing deck, brand health between tracker waves, and a weekly competitor brief on a fixed competitor set.
• Marketing and brand: campaign reads at 2, 4 and 8 weeks against the pre-launch baseline, and a monthly read on which claims consumers actually repeat back.
• Innovation and R&D: a quarterly whitespace scan, launch reads at 30, 60 and 90 days, and review alerts by SKU when ratings fall.
• Data and analytics: the consumer “why” behind your BI dashboards, on a versioned method, so you can tell whether the data changed or your method did.

How Welch’s turns research into decisions with Playbooks

Welch’s three-person consumer insights team supports brand, innovation, licensing, category management, and sales. The general AI tools they tried first struggled with the volume of data within about a week. So they tested Merciv against about ten past reports, checked that it reached the conclusions they already trusted, and Christian Lavoie built a process he could repeat: run the analysis in Merciv, send it to the research partner for a final check, and move on to the recommendation, in days instead of weeks. The partner’s verdict on one of those analyses: “They said it was 100% right.”

Why not ChatGPT, Claude, or General AI?

Recurring research usually gets automated one of two ways. Workflow builders like n8n and Zapier repeat reliably, but someone has to wire every node, and the workflow breaks as soon as a step needs judgment. Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity bring judgment, but they save a prompt rather than a process, so the model replans the work on every run. A Playbook combines the two: the steps, sources and format stay fixed, and the reasoning happens inside each step.

For a news digest or a first draft, a scheduled task is enough. Recurring insights work needs more, because findings only compare across runs if the method holds.

Real insights work is bigger than a prompt. A business review is dozens of steps across sales and POS data, past research, syndicated panels, and thousands of reviews, posts, and searches, checked against each other for every brand. Decisions ride on it. General AI hits file and context limits, samples when it runs out of room, and fills gaps with confident prose. A Playbook runs every step at full depth, names any source it couldn’t reach, and marks the run partial instead of papering over it.

Each time a scheduled prompt runs, the model replans the work: which sources, how far back, which brands and competitors, which cuts, what layout. The differences compound. It reads fewer reviews this month, stops splitting by retailer, drops a competitor without saying so. The report looks the same, but the numbers no longer compare.

A Playbook fixes the procedure. Research, synthesis, analysis, and reporting run as defined steps, with the same sources, coverage, calculations, and format every time. Each run records its version and can only cite what it actually retrieved. When a number moves between runs, the change came from the data.

It starts from, and adds to, what your team already knows. A general AI tool is a brilliant stranger: capable, but missing your past studies, methods and the findings your team has already debated. Merciv’s knowledge foundation holds that context (your research library, brands, competitors, internal data and ways of working) alongside the consumer data Merciv collects every day. Every run draws on it, so the analysis reflects your company and your market, not a generic read of the internet. And it compounds: what your team learns this quarter shapes the next run.

Getting started

Playbooks are available today for select enterprise users. To learn more, get in touch or read our docs. To understand how Playbooks map to your team’s use cases and needs, request a tailored demo.