Automated research briefs let anyone on your team request a deep dive on any topic, a prospect before a call, a new market, a vendor, and get back a written brief with cited sources by the next morning. It only states what a real source backs up. Most teams are live in one to two weeks.
The problem
The research always lands on the person with the least time for it. You have a call at 9am with a company you have never dealt with. You are weighing a new market and need to know who already plays there. A client asks whether a vendor is any good and you have never heard of them. So you open fifteen tabs, skim a report you half trust, scroll a LinkedIn profile, glance at a review page, and try to hold it all in your head. It happens the night before or in the ten minutes before the meeting, and the read is always shallower than you would like.
Put a number on it. A Forrester study conducted for Airtable found that knowledge workers spend 30 percent of their time looking for the information they need. On a 40-hour week that is about 12 hours per person. In a 30-person firm where even six people do this kind of research-heavy prep, sales reps sizing up accounts, a founder scoping a market, that is more than 70 hours a week going into gathering rather than deciding.
The hours are not the real cost. The real cost is walking into a call knowing the company's homepage and nothing about the funding round they closed last month. It is deciding to enter a market off a read so thin it misses the two players who own it. It is the brief that never got written, because building it properly meant 90 minutes nobody had, so the call or the decision went ahead half-blind. None of that shows up on a timesheet, and all of it is expensive.
How the automation works
You ask for a brief.
Someone types a request where they already work, Slack or email: brief me on this company, this market, this vendor, this question, plus a line on what they actually need to know and by when.
It researches overnight.
The system reads across public sources for that specific question, company sites and news, filings, review profiles, market and industry references, pulls out what is relevant, and keeps a link to every source it used.
It delivers a written brief by morning.
You get a structured brief: what it found, each point linked to its source, and a plain note on what it could not confirm, so nothing sits in there unsupported.
The pieces are proven: web research at scale, a model that reads and summarizes across sources, citation back to the original, and delivery into Slack, email, or a doc. The real work is the wiring. The first hard part is source quality control, deciding which sources are trustworthy and rejecting the junk, because a confident brief built on a bad source is worse than no brief. The second is scoping, turning a one-line request into the real question, so the brief answers what was asked and not something adjacent. Done badly, both fail the same way: a brief that sounds sure of itself and is quietly wrong. So it is set up to cite every claim and to say what it could not find instead of inventing an answer. That is what gets tested and handed over during implementation.
What this looks like in practice
One rep has a 9am discovery call with a prospect the team has never sold to.
- Prospect research happens the night before or in the 15 minutes before the call.
- The rep builds a picture from the company's homepage and a LinkedIn scroll, and misses a leadership change and a funding round from last month.
- A proper brief would take 90 minutes the rep does not have, so most first calls start half-blind.
- The evening before, the rep sends one line: brief me on this prospect for a 9am call.
- By 7am there is a two-page brief: what the company does, recent news and funding, likely priorities, who is on the call, each point linked to its source.
- The rep walks in knowing the account, and the brief flags what it could not confirm, so nothing gets assumed.
Typical impact
Typical ranges for this pattern, not client claims. Your numbers get modeled in the audit.
Systems it connects
Plus most tools with an API. The audit maps your exact stack.
Who this fits
- Your people regularly need to get up to speed fast on a company, market, vendor, or topic they do not already know
- 10 or more employees, with sales, exec, or research roles that keep doing this prep by hand
- The work is one-off deep dives on request, not a standing watch on the same targets every week
- Someone will actually read and act on the brief, and you are fine with public sources plus whatever you feed it