Overview

A global consulting firm partnered with Lucid to analyze how 400 HVAC companies communicate value to their customers.
The goal: uncover patterns in messaging that reveal which aspects of value most influence purchasing decisions, without manually reviewing thousands of web pages.

Challenge

The client's advisory framework defines six core dimensions of business value. Traditionally, assessing how companies express these values required weeks of manual qualitative analysis.
Our task was to build an automated, AI-driven system that could evaluate hundreds of company websites and produce statistically grounded insights, accurate enough for executive-level presentations and fast enough to deliver inside a week.

Solution

New Clarity designed a custom retrieval and evaluation agent powered by OpenAI and Pinecone.
Using a multi-step pipeline built in n8n, we:

• Scraped 400 company websites (up to 15 pages each) and cleaned the data for semantic relevance.
• Embedded every text chunk using OpenAI text-embedding-3-large and stored it in a Pinecone vector database.
• Queried the corpus against six custom evaluation prompts representing the client’s proprietary value dimensions.
• Scored each company 0–10 on every dimension, with confidence weighting calculated by the LLM itself.
• Visualized the distribution of results in histograms and heatmaps, exposing clear industry-wide patterns.

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Findings

The analysis revealed striking clarity:

• “Risk-Free” messaging (guarantees, warranties, service assurances) clustered at the top end (6–9/10) across nearly all companies, showing that de-risking the purchase is a universal emphasis in HVAC marketing.
• Purpose-driven messaging (mission, community impact) scored consistently low (3–5/10), highlighting an underutilized differentiation lever.
• Regional variations and brand vs. contractor influence were also quantified, offering nuanced insights previously impossible to surface at scale.

Results

• 400 websites analyzed in under 3 days
• 6 dimensions evaluated automatically with contextual examples and confidence scores
• Generated a 4x return for the partner firm through new client revenue and strategic differentiation
• Insights praised by the CEO of a Fortune 500 manufacturer for their clarity and strategic value

Impact

The partner firm was able to walk into a high-stakes industry event with data-backed storytelling, turning what was once subjective interpretation into an objective, visualized landscape of market messaging.
The system now serves as a template for future large-scale qualitative analyses, extending the firm’s consulting capability through AI.

Key Takeaway

AI isn’t replacing human insight; it’s amplifying it.
By combining retrieval-based LLMs with structured evaluation logic, Lucid helps consulting and advisory firms turn scattered qualitative data into quantifiable competitive advantage.

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