Corporate AI hiring tends to front-run R&D investment by six to twelve months — and the gap between the most AI-active companies and the rest is getting wider. Those are the headline findings from Company Profiler, a new benchmarking platform that scores more than 500 companies across 15 industries on their AI readiness.
The tool was built by Mike Berkley, a product executive who has worked at Spotify, Fubo, Axios, and Viacom. It assigns a Master AI Score between 0 and 100 to each company, drawing on over 50,000 data points from job postings via the Adzuna API, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, and public announcements. The scoring model weights AI hiring intensity at 40%, R&D investment at 30%, public AI initiatives at 20%, and competitive positioning at 10%.
That last category warrants some scrutiny. "Competitive positioning" is inherently harder to quantify than headcount data or SEC line items, and Berkley hasn't published a detailed breakdown of how it's operationalized. The Adzuna job-posting sample is also worth examining: listing data tends to be noisy, with duplicates and inconsistent job title taxonomy across sectors — a problem that would flow directly into the hiring intensity calculations that carry the heaviest weight in the model.
The platform's industry-level numbers are stark: software companies average 75 out of 100, while retail sits at 42. Berkley also reports that some legacy enterprises are out-hiring and out-spending companies that typically carry "AI-native" branding — a finding that cuts against the way much of the industry frames the competitive picture. Companies scoring above 80 are pulling further ahead of those below 50, he adds.
The stack is lean: Node.js and Express on the backend, SQLite for storage, and Kimi K2.5 — Moonshot AI's flagship model — handling the analysis layer. The whole thing runs on a Mac Mini behind Cloudflare. Berkley is keeping the scoring tool free for now, with potential future revenue from API access, detailed reports, and custom benchmarking. He is also looking for data partnerships with researchers and journalists.