Playbook: Price-watching agent

Supplier or competitor prices change and nobody notices until margin is gone

The problem

Purchase prices drift. A supplier raises a price list, a competitor drops a price, an exchange rate moves — and you find out weeks later, in the margin report. Checking manually is boring work nobody does consistently.

What you end up with

An agent that wakes up on its own every morning, compares today's prices with what it saw last time, and sends you only the differences: what changed, by how much, and which of your products it affects. Nothing changed means no message.

What it needs

Build it step by step

  1. Open a new conversation with the Agent Builder.

  2. Describe the agent:

    Create an agent called "Price Watch". Every working day at 07:00 it should read the current purchase prices for the products in the "A-class" group from my instance, compare them with the prices it reported last time, and notify me only about products whose price changed by more than 1%. The message should list product, old price, new price, percentage and supplier, sorted by the largest change.

  3. When the Builder asks how it should remember the previous prices, choose the simplest option that fits: either it reads the previous price from the instance, or — if you want a real history — say:

    Keep a history of the prices you report so you can compare against the last run.

  4. Open the Activation tab of the agent and confirm the schedule is there and enabled.

  5. Set how you want to be told: a notification in Operator, an email, or both.

    Send the summary to me by email as well, with subject "Price changes — ".

  6. Save.

Try it

Don't wait until tomorrow morning. In chat, tell the agent:

Run your daily price check now and show me what you would send.

Read the output as if it arrived at 07:00. Too noisy? Raise the threshold. Too quiet? Lower it or widen the product group.

Variations

Where it can go wrong