A research assistant that hands you a brief, not a list of links
An AI research assistant takes a question, one-off or tracked every week, and comes back with a short brief: the answer, the evidence, and where it came from. You read one page with sources attached and skip the ten open tabs.
A single question (“what’s the current state of X”) and a standing watch (“keep tracking X and tell me what’s new”) produce the same kind of sourced brief. The only difference is the schedule. A morning brief example shows a scheduled update with sources and a clear boundary around actions that need your decision.
It’s built for research that eats an afternoon: comparing vendors, tracking a market, checking whether a claim in a pitch deck holds up. The operator does the reading and comparing, and you make the call once the brief is in front of you.
What you hand off
A research request or standing topic typically covers:
- Searching the web and pulling the most relevant, credible sources on the question
- Building a verified press list from a named beat, outlet and public contact route
- Reading documents or folders you point it to and folding them into the brief
- Comparing options against criteria you give it, such as price, features or fit
- Tracking a topic on a schedule and reporting only what’s changed since last time
- Structuring the output as a direct answer, the supporting points, and sources
- Flagging where sources disagree or the evidence is thin, and leaving the call to you
A weekly brief, worked through
Say Priya runs a two-person product team at Brackenwold Studio and wants to stay current on AI browser agents without spending her Friday afternoon reading blog posts. Her standing instruction: “Every Friday at 4, research what’s new in AI browser agents this week and send me a one-page brief with sources.”
That Friday, the operator searches for news, product launches and technical write-ups from the past seven days. It reads a dozen sources, discards a few that are low-quality or repeat what’s known, and drafts a brief with four sections: what launched, what changed in existing products, one notable technical debate, and a one-line “why it matters” for Priya’s roadmap. Each point links to its source.
Because the topic recurs, the operator compares the draft against last week’s brief and adds a “what’s new since last week” note at the top. By 4:15, the brief is in Priya’s inbox, and she reads it in five minutes.
Three weeks in, Priya flags one source as a low-quality aggregator she doesn’t trust. She tells the operator once, and it drops that source from future briefs and leans on primary sources like product changelogs and engineering blogs. The standing topic keeps running every week with the new source list.
What stays with you
Research, reading, comparing and drafting happen without your sign-off, since none of it changes anything outside your operator’s workspace. Anything that leaves that workspace on your behalf waits for you: sending the brief to a client, posting it publicly, or acting on a recommendation, such as contacting a vendor it found.
If a topic needs paid access or a source behind a login, your operator tells you and leaves out what it can’t verify. Every brief carries its sources, so you can check the reasoning before you rely on it.
Setting it up
- Give it a question, or a standing topic and a cadence (weekly, monthly, or after a trigger like a competitor’s launch).
- Point it at any documents, folders or past research it should factor in.
- Tell it how deep to go and what format you want the brief in.
- Choose where the brief should land: a channel like Slack or email, or the web.
You can turn a one-off request into a recurring one at any point, or the reverse. If a topic stops being useful, drop it.