Pri0r1ty Intelligence Group listed on London’s AIM this week, bolstering the UK’s artificial intelligence small-cap sector by adding to the selection of growth companies with AI at the heart of their operations.
The UK’s AI sector is, at long last, starting to build momentum with more and more companies developing AI services and offering public equity investors exposure to the sector, which will likely drive economic growth in the years to come.
However, investors should consider whether London’s latest addition enriches the sector in terms of innovation. A study of Pri0r1ty’s admission document suggests their platform isn’t as groundbreaking as it first looks with much of their offering a replication of tools available elsewhere.
The UK Investor Magazine has previously highlighted technology and marketing companies that jump on the latest trends and raise funds to develop products but struggle to build meaningful market traction. For example, in 2020, we explored the fundamental constraints of Bidstack’s in-gaming native advertising model and the warning signs of slow revenue growth, which can be read here. In this article, we take a similar approach to Pri0r1ty Intelligence Group.
Although PriOr1ty’s IPO – facilitated by a reverse takeover (RTO) of a SPAC – is a major positive for London’s small-cap tech sector, the company’s service doesn’t appear to offer anything particularly new to a target market that already has many existing options to choose from. And the pricing strategy outlined in the admission document suggests their service may be far more expensive.
The admission document names Hootsuite, Jasper AI and Seedlegals as competitors. In reality, the competition probably runs into the hundreds of companies.
In social management alone, there are already dozens of established services with a core of around 10 services that any social media manager worth their salt will know intimately. Many of these cost no more than £15 per month. Hootsuite, the market leader, charges £89 per month for its ‘professional’ package. This compares to £499 for PriOr1ty’s package.
PriOr1ty launched the ‘Pri0r1ty Advisor GPT’ chatbot-style customer service tool called ‘Pri0r1ty Spotlight’ powered and trained by AI LLMs in late 2024. This has been one of the most exciting areas of Gen AI so far, as it reduces the need for customer service staff and is one of the most straightforward ways of implementing AI to cut costs.
However, PriOr1ty faces the challenge of competing against the heavyweight CRM companies HubSpot, Zoho, and Salesforce, as well as billion-dollar Intercom – a leader in AI Agent customer service – all of whom have invested tens of millions in integrating similar AI-powered functions into their offerings.
In terms of pricing, Hubspot costs around £50 per user per month, while Intercom starts at $29 per month.
It is also worth noting that, at the time of writing, PriOr1ty’s case study AI chatbot developed for a drinks company called Favela Cerveja featured on PriOr1ty AI’s website homepage isn’t immediately available on Favela Cerveja’s own website to test out.
PriOr1ty has earmarked five different platforms/services to be launched in 2025. It is not clear whether these will be standalone services or accessible on one platform. It is clear, however, that each service by itself isn’t particularly groundbreaking.
‘PriOr1ty Ventures’, as detailed in the admission document, doesn’t seem to offer anything already accessible through other long-established services. Google Analytics, ChatGPT and a simple CRM like Hubspot will be able to cover all of the key features. These are all systems marketers will likely have in place already.
The company’s success will hinge on price and user experience. PriOr1ty will rightly have some success onboarding organisations with limited existing marketing operations or inexperienced marketing staff.
However, it’s difficult to pinpoint why firms with established marketing or public relations functions would migrate over their existing work streams to PriOr1ty‘s service, which could result in higher costs, depending on the size of the organisation. This should be a consideration for investors.
Organisations of any substantial size require deeply specific tools to meet the demands of sometimes complex workstreams. It’s inconceivable for a company with departments for finance, marketing, sales, research, and legal, each with its own dedicated team, will find the depth it needs in Pri0r1ty’s services and products.
Most of PriOr1ty’s ‘product key functionalities’ outlined in the admission document can be completed very easily using AI tools like Jasper AI, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini alongside traditional applications like the Adobe suite.
For more than a year, marketing teams around the world have been using AI tools as a matter of course to complete day-to-day tasks like creating content slated as ‘key functionalities’ of ‘Pri0r1ty Spotlight’.
Tasks mentioned by Pri0r1ty as core to their product, such as ‘Build content based on stakeholder feedback’ or ‘Generate press releases, regulatory news or internal memos’ can be done in seconds using LLM tools like ChatGPT, Jasper AI or Claude, should someone wish to substitute a human for AI in the creation of crucial communications. The suggestion that Pri0r1ty’s users will generate important regulatory news using relatively new and untested AI is interesting.
Overall, it appears Pri0r1ty will act more like a marketing agency bringing together a suite of services for SME marketing companies with little internal marketing capabilities. It doesn’t appear to offer anything that will win over the mass market.
Valuation
This questions the valuation and whether the current market cap can be sustained. For the sake of confidence in London’s small-cap markets, one would hope sales would rise sharply to justify the rich valuation.
We recently highlighted GenIP as the standout UK small-cap Gen AI stock. This remains the case after PriOr1ty‘s AIM admission. GenIP has identified a clear pain point for its target market and is providing a solution to a problem that is being adopted by some of the world’s largest technology firms. This type of traction is absent from PriOr1ty‘s admission document.
There are also a number of companies pivoting towards AI with much lower valuations despite being at a similar stage to PriOr1ty. Cel AI is a notable example.
