How to automate research and vetting

The three vendor bids have been sitting in your inbox since Tuesday, and the holdup was never indecision. Earning the decision takes two hours of license lookups, review reading, and cross-checking, and those two hours keep losing to everything with a deadline attached.

Research has two parts. Judgment is the part you are paid for. Collection is the part that eats the calendar: opening twenty tabs, skimming, copying claims into a doc, losing the link, finding the link again, and reconciling three sources that almost agree.

The collection loop

Every vetting job runs the same circuit. Find the sources. Extract the claims. Check the claims against each other. Notice the gap: the license that does not come up, the review pattern that smells wrong, the funding note that contradicts the about page. Then shape all of it into something a decision can rest on.

And because the collection is manual, it is also disposable. The notes land in a doc nobody can find by Thursday, and next quarter the same vendor gets vetted again from scratch, by whoever draws the short straw.

None of that is hard. All of it is slow, and it is slowest exactly when you need it fastest: the meeting is tomorrow, the bid expires Friday, the launch is next month.

What does handing it off look like?

In Agent FM, you ask for the artifact you wish existed: the side by side, the one page brief, the teardown doc. You name the sources you would check yourself, and it does the visiting, the extracting, and the cross-checking, in your own logins where a login is needed. What comes back is written, linked, and honest about its gaps. The judgment call stays exactly where it was.

Two habits make these asks land well. Name the sources you trust, because you know where the bodies are buried in your own industry and a generic search does not. And say what format you want back, a sheet, a memo, a one pager, so the result drops straight into your workflow instead of needing a rewrite.

When there is money on the table and three companies claiming to deserve it, this is the ask. Back comes a comparison sheet, a three sentence read, and flags on anything that would not verify.

Use caseVet three vendors before we sign oneVet [vendors] before we pick one: licenses, insurance, reviews, and red flags.View →

Before a meeting, the brief you never have time to write is the one that makes the meeting shorter. Ask the evening before; read it with your coffee. It returns one page: what they do, what changed lately, and who will be in the room.

Use caseBrief me on a company before tomorrow's meetingBuild a one-page brief on [company] before my meeting: what they do, news, who I'm meeting.View →

Watching a competitor is recurring research, which is exactly the kind that quietly stops happening after week two. The teardown below is the deep pass; what comes back is a doc you can hand to anyone on the team without a briefing.

Use caseTear down a competitor's store before our next launchBuild a teardown of [competitor]: pricing, shipping, bestsellers, and review themes.View →

Can you trust what comes back?

Trust here is provenance. Every claim arrives with its source linked, and anything that could not be confirmed gets flagged rather than smoothed over; a blank beats a guess every time. Research asks touch nobody: no outreach, no forms, nothing outward, unless you explicitly ask for a draft, and drafts wait for your OK. You can also open the session and watch the checking happen, which turns out to be a fast way to learn where the good sources are.

Make the watching recurring

One-off vetting answers today's question. The compounding value is the watch: the same teardown refreshed on a schedule, with changes flagged instead of rediscovered. Set it to Routine · Mondays 8am and competitor moves become a brief you skim instead of a scramble the week before the quarterly review. The pre-call brief earns a schedule too if your calendar has a standing external meeting. Weekly is usually right for competitors, monthly for vendors and partners; watching faster than the subject moves just produces noise.

See also: How to set up a morning brief you actually read and How to ask an AI assistant for real work.

The decisions were always yours. The twenty tabs never were. Ask for the brief instead of assembling it, and spend the reclaimed hours on the judgment the research was for. Get early access on macOS or Windows; when access opens, make the vendor pile your first handoff.