Research & Reporting Agents
A large amount of skilled time goes into assembling things nobody wants to read twice: the weekly summary, the pre-call briefing, the competitor round-up, the monthly numbers pulled from four systems into one document. The work is real but it is not judgement — the judgement happens after the document exists. A research agent produces the document. It gathers from your own systems and the sources you nominate, summarises with the citation attached, and delivers on a schedule or on request. The person who used to spend the morning compiling it spends it deciding what to do about it instead.
What it takes over
- Recurring reportsthe weekly, the monthly, the board pack section — pulled from the systems that hold the numbers, assembled into the format you already use, and delivered on time without anyone chasing it.
- Briefings on demanda summary of an account, a company or a topic, compiled at the point someone needs it. Most useful immediately before a call, which is exactly when nobody has time to compile one.
- Monitoring and round-upswatching sources you care about and reporting what changed rather than everything that exists. The filtering is the value; an unfiltered feed is what you already have.
- Summarising your own corpuslong documents, transcripts, ticket histories, survey responses. Retrieval over your material, with the summary traceable back to the passage it came from.
What stays with your team
- Every claim in a brief carries its source. A summary you cannot check is a summary you cannot use in a decision.
- The agent reports; it does not recommend a course of action or make the call. Where a report needs a view, that is a named person’s view.
- A source that is unreliable does not become reliable by being summarised. Where the underlying data is thin, the brief says so rather than smoothing it over.
- Numbers that matter — anything going into a board pack or a filing — are reconciled against the system of record, not reported from a summary of it.
What it connects to
- The databases, warehouses and spreadsheets holding your numbers
- Internal documents, transcripts and ticket history
- Public sources and any subscriptions you already pay for
- Wherever the report needs to land — email, a document, a channel, a dashboard
What changes once it’s running
- The recurring report arrives on schedule without a person assembling it
- Briefings exist at the moment they are useful rather than after the call
- Summaries are checkable, because the source travels with the claim
- Skilled time moves from compiling information to acting on it
Questions about research & reporting agents
How do we trust a summary we did not write?
By being able to check it. Each claim in the output is attributable to the passage or record it came from, so verification is a click rather than a re-read of the source material. That is a deliberate design constraint: an unsourced summary saves time right up until the first time it is wrong in a meeting, and then it costs more than it ever saved.
Can it use our internal data and not just the public web?
Yes, and internal data is usually where the value is. Retrieval-augmented generation over your own documents, records and history is what makes a brief specific to your business rather than a general summary of a market. What it requires is that the material is reachable — a well-maintained internal source is close to free to use, and a shared drive of unlabelled scans is a project of its own first.
What if the report needs a judgement call?
Then the judgement stays with a person and the agent stops at the material they need to make it. This is the line we hold on this kind of work: assembling evidence is automatable, deciding what it means is not, and a report that quietly blurs the two is worse than one that does less. The agent can flag what looks anomalous; it does not conclude.
Does it run on a schedule or when we ask?
Either, and most deployments use both — a fixed schedule for the recurring reports, on-demand for briefings. Scheduled runs are the ones that change how a team works, because a report that reliably exists on Monday morning gets built into the week, and one that has to be requested does not.