Can an agent do market research?
Mostly, for desk research. An agent gathers, synthesises and structures published information at a scale and speed no analyst matches. It cannot generate primary insight, and it will present a confident synthesis of thin sources.
- Hours back per week
- 8
- Human cost
- €3,000–10,000 per research project
- Agent cost
- €30–100/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Gather published sources
YESReports, filings, news, forums, reviews — far more widely than a person will.
Synthesise into a structure
YESMarket map, segments, players, dynamics. Fast and coherent.
Size a market
HALFIt builds a defensible model. Every input is an estimate and it rarely says so loudly enough.
Mine customer voice
YESReviews, forums and support tickets at volume. Consistently the most valuable output.
- Yours
Talk to real customers
NOT YETThe thing that actually changes your mind. Nothing here substitutes for it.
Decide what it means
HALFSynthesis is not strategy.
3/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Customer conversations
- Strategic conclusions
- Judging source quality in your field
How this goes wrong
A polished report built on three blog posts citing each other. Insist on source-by-source citation with dates, and the thin research becomes visible immediately.
What it needs access to
- Web search
- Review sites
- Filings and industry data
- Docs
- Analytics
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my research agent. For [question]: gather sources widely and cite every one with a date and a link. Structure your findings, and for each significant claim indicate how many independent sources support it — flag anything resting on a single source or on sources that all trace back to the same origin. Where you are estimating rather than reporting, label it clearly and show the assumptions. Mine reviews and forums for how customers actually describe the problem, quoted verbatim. End with what you could not find out and what would require talking to real people. Never present an estimate as a measurement.
Questions people ask
Can it replace a research agency?
For desk research, largely yes, and much faster. For anything requiring primary interviews, panels or fieldwork, no — and those are the projects where research changes decisions.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Web search and Review sites, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a market research agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.