Part 3 · Working With AI Tools
Deep Research for Evidence-Based Decisions
A slide is only as strong as its evidence. You need three suppliers compared before Friday's meeting, two days of work the old way. So you open a Deep Research tool, type one loose sentence, and get back twenty confident pages that answer a slightly different question than the one you needed.
Why This Matters
Deep Research in Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity will read hundreds of sources and return a cited report in minutes, work that used to take days. That speed is the trap. The report is only as good as the brief you write for it. By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
- Commission a Deep Research task against a real decision you face
- Write a research brief that specifies context, scope, criteria, and output format
- Evaluate the report you get back against that brief
What you are commissioning
A Deep Research task is an agent, a scoped task you start and stop. You hand it a brief; it plans, searches, reads across sources, compiles a cited report, and then stops. You do not manage it like a colleague. You specify it like a tool, and everything rides on how well you specify.
A strong brief has four parts. Context: who you are and the decision the report feeds. Scope: the boundaries (what to include, what to leave out, the time range and region that count). Criteria: what makes a source credible to you, and the dimensions you want compared. Output format: the structure, the length, table or prose, and the demand that every claim carries a citation.
- Context: who you are, and the decision this report feeds.
- Scope: include, exclude, time range, region.
- Criteria: what makes a source credible; what to compare on.
- Output format: structure, length, and a citation on every claim.
A Deep Research report reads authoritatively even when it is wrong. The citations are your audit trail. A claim you cannot trace back to a credible source it names is a claim you do not yet trust.
Key Takeaway
The report lands in minutes, and deciding what you will stake a decision on stays your work.
Check your understanding
Self-check only. Nothing is scored and nothing is recorded; open an answer to compare it with your own.
Priya manages vendor relationships for a logistics company. She needs to recommend a new fleet tracking platform to her director by Friday. She opens Claude and types: 'What are the best fleet tracking platforms?' The response lists 8 platforms with brief descriptions but no pricing, no integration details, and some platforms she has never heard of. What should Priya do differently?
- Use Gemini instead, it has better information about logistics software.
- Ask the same question three times and combine the answers for a more complete picture.
- Rewrite the prompt as a research brief: specify her fleet size, current systems, comparison criteria (price per vehicle, API integration with her TMS, real-time vs batch updates, contract length), and ask for a comparison table with cited sources.
- Ask a colleague who recently evaluated fleet tracking platforms for their recommendation.
Show the answer
Rewrite the prompt as a research brief: specify her fleet size, current systems, comparison criteria (price per vehicle, API integration with her TMS, real-time vs batch updates, contract length), and ask for a comparison table with cited sources.
David used Gemini Deep Research to investigate customer onboarding software for his SaaS startup. The report is 2,000 words with 12 citations. He is about to forward it to his co-founder as the basis for their purchasing decision. Before he sends it, what should he check?
- Whether the report is long enough; 2,000 words might not be sufficient for a purchasing decision.
- Verify at least 3 citations for accuracy, confirm the report covers all criteria from his brief, and check whether the pricing information is current.
- Run the same query in Claude and Perplexity to see if they give the same recommendations.
- Nothing. Deep Research cites its sources, so the report is reliable enough to share.
Show the answer
Verify at least 3 citations for accuracy, confirm the report covers all criteria from his brief, and check whether the pricing information is current.
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