TL;DR
- Cluely is undetectable AI that sees your screen, hears your calls, and feeds you answers - in real time.
- We use it during B2B mystery-shopping calls to surface pricing intel fast and stay perfectly in persona.
What is Cluely?
Took this photo with my phone because Cluely is undetectable by screen recording stuff
Cluely is a desktop overlay that whispers suggestions while you talk. It tracks the audio and the shared screen, then drops one-line prompts only you can see. No browser plugin, no watermark, zero chance the person on the other side spots it — it's undetectable.
The tool went viral for its bold "cheat on everything" marketing, sparking a media frenzy and attracting $15 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Naturally, this has led to a cat-and-mouse game, with rival startups launching products to detect it. As TechCrunch reports, Cluely's founders are already planning their next moves to stay invisible.
Police shut down founders after party at YC before it began...
While the press focused on academic cheating, Cluely has since pivoted its messaging toward professional use cases, the very reason we adopted it. For us, it's not about cheating; it's about conducting the perfect competitor pricing research call. It's the ultimate tool for our discreet B2B mystery shopping audits, ensuring our team never misses a beat when extracting the intel.
What is B2B mystery shopping?
When a competitor locks prices behind "Talk to sales," Googling stops being research and starts being guesswork. That's where B2B mystery shopping steps in. We build credible buyer personas, complete with a full LinkedIn history, corporate email, and even budget authority, and run them through a rival's funnel.
Along the way we collect:
- First-touch speed (the average inbox reply is still a sluggish 2.7 hours).
- Demo choreography: who's on the call, how deep the screenshare goes, and which features get hidden until renewal.
- Live quote mechanics: base list, volume triggers, quarter-end discounts, and the final PDF.
The result is a buyer-experience audit and competitor benchmarking pack that slices a six-month competitive intel project down to six days, fully GDPR-compliant. The output is hard data: competitor pricing research, buyer-experience audit, sales-process stress test, and full competitor benchmarking, all wrapped in GDPR-compliant competitive intel.
How we use Cluely on the call
Asking Cluely about the current conversation
While Cluely was designed to help sales reps handle objections, we've found it's just as powerful on the other side of the table. For our mystery shopping, it's become an indispensable tool for asking the right questions, not just answering them.
The magic is that Cluely transcribes the call in real-time. This means our analysts can essentially "chat" with the transcript as it's being built. Instead of just seeing pre-written prompts, they can ask questions about the conversation, as it happens.
For example:
- If a rep mentions a specific feature, our analyst can ask Cluely to instantly formulate three follow-up questions about its limitations.
- When a question about discounts is deflected, they can ask Cluely for alternative ways to phrase it based on what the rep just said.
- It helps our shoppers stay in character. An analyst can discretely ask, "Remind me what my persona's budget is for this quarter?"
- If a new piece of information emerges, like a competitor name-drop, they can ask Cluely to summarize what we know about them from previous calls.
This turns a standard Q&A into a dynamic interrogation. We're not just following a script; we're having a live, AI-assisted conversation that helps us uncover details other methods would miss. The end result is more pricing levers exposed, tighter transcripts, and a cleaner playbook for your own sales team.
Final Thoughts
While "cheating" makes for a great headline, the real story is about efficiency and data quality. Tools like Cluely, when used ethically for B2B intelligence, don't just level the playing field; they clear the fog of guesswork. It's about replacing assumptions with hard data.
Want to learn more about B2B mystery shopping? Get in touch to discuss your competitive intel needs.
