Research & Knowledge AI agent use cases
89 real things people got AI agents to do in Research & Knowledge, each with what they asked, how it went, and the prompt to copy.
Analyze 170k LLM logs overnight
A user left a Gemini agent running overnight to analyze 170k LLM logs with the llm CLI and a free model, and it finished the job despite limits.
Automate a weekly arXiv paper triage
A weekly Codex automation searches arXiv for keywords, logs new papers to a CSV, sorts them into keep/skim/drop buckets and can check claims against Zotero.
Build a personal research wiki from papers and articles
Cursor Agent writes and maintains interlinked markdown pages from user-supplied sources, summarizing and cross-referencing, with Obsidian used to browse.
Build a student survey form with Manus
Manus built a Google Form survey on undergraduates' views of AGI; the author hit a snag when asking it to fill the survey with synthesized student responses.
Build data analysis reports and dashboards with a coding agent
A toolkit gives a coding agent a semantic layer and dashboard files so it can query data warehouses and publish in-depth reports and visualizations.
Build data pipelines and analysis for a research paper
A researcher used Claude Code as the main agent to build data pipelines and do the data analysis for a paper, generating over 98% of the code.
Build searchable knowledge bases from videos and papers
An OpenClaw agent runs a YouTube summariser and a paper-condensing tool, saving Markdown into two indexed knowledge bases for videos and papers.
Catalog and summarize papers dropped into Drive
An n8n workflow extracts metadata from new PDFs, finds related papers on Semantic Scholar and PubMed, builds an APA citation, logs to Sheets and creates a Notion summary.
Collate WHO data into a multi-tab spreadsheet
Testers had ChatGPT Agent navigate the WHO site, extract the latest data and organise it by indicator, country and trend; it often fails on logins or dynamic pages.
Collect financial data on 100 independent schools
A writer had Operator gather financial data for independent schools in the background; it was slow and was stopped after about 25 schools, then the data went to o1 for analysis.
Compile a daily digest of Reddit AI tool chatter
A Lindy agent searches Reddit for conversations about new AI tools, compiles popular topics and updates a document daily.
Compile an annotated bibliography and draft a paper
ChatGPT Agent searched academic databases for recent open-access empirical papers, grouped them by field, wrote an annotated bibliography, noted research gaps and assembled a draft.
Compile genealogy research into a spreadsheet and plan
A commenter had ChatGPT build a spreadsheet for her genealogy research, and agent mode was recommended for compiling and formatting findings into a usable document.
Compile journalist lists and search apartment listings
A reporter tested Manus on building a reporter list, searching NYC rentals and finding award candidates; results were thin at first, and a three-hour search yielded only three full profiles.
Compile recent LLM research papers into a Word doc
Comet found major LLM/agent training papers from six months with links and analysis, then saved them to a Word doc via Outlook.
Do equity research with Claude Code without coding
A non-engineer keeps research in a folder of plain-text files managed with Obsidian and uses Claude Code for equity research.
Draft research by gathering many web sources
A G2 reviewer uses Manus to scrape sites, read images and gather many sources into a summary in the background, but says credits run out fast.
Email a daily AI news brief and build slide decks from tabs
Comet searches the day's AI news, picks the top 5 stories and emails a brief, and merges tagged tabs and reports into a cited Google Slides deck.
Extract CRM pricing and ratings into a spreadsheet
A reviewer had Manus visit the top 15 CRM sites and pull pricing tiers, free plan limits and G2 ratings into a spreadsheet; long tasks were unreliable.
Find connections across 100 non-fiction books
Claude Code browses a personal library with CLI tools and surfaces trails of related excerpts across books.
Find Reddit threads on reader pain points
A newsletter writer had Comet find Reddit threads on reader pain points, finding extra sources in about 15 minutes without intervention.
Gather three years of meeting minutes into text files
Jeff Adams used the Claude Chrome extension to collect meeting minutes into text files and load them into a notebook, taking 3-4 hours over three sessions.
Generate deep research reports into Notion
An n8n workflow turns a topic into up to three Tavily searches, compiles a Markdown report with an agent, and pushes it to a Notion page.
Generate updated research reports on followed companies
The poster built and open-sourced a custom stock-research agent that produces updated reports on companies they follow.
Give a coding agent a paper corpus to find new techniques
Poster gave a Claude Code agent access to about 2M papers to search before each attempt; it found techniques it otherwise wouldn't know and beat a baseline agent.
Grade Cursor on a real data science project
A data scientist tested Cursor on a real project: weak on pandas, data cleansing and scraping, strong at prototyping.
Have Claude collect names from a Wikipedia page into a file
The poster tried Claude Computer Use to open Firefox, search Wikipedia, find all names on a page and save them to a text file.
Investigate papers overnight with a bot research team
Grok Bot roles read new papers and extract claims, rerun analyses, and scan sources, working overnight to produce briefs.
Let Cursor maintain an Obsidian notes vault
Cursor reviews vault structure, suggests connections, answers questions about notes and writes a daily done note documenting other agent sessions.
Link journal entries and write book reviews in Obsidian
The author uses Claude Code in their Obsidian vault to add backlinks and entity notes to journal entries and to turn brain dumps into formatted book reviews.
Measure how long jobs stay open at tech companies
An agent read 25 open jobs each at five companies and measured how long each had been posted, e.g. 21 of 25 at Figma were 60+ days old.
Mine Reddit threads into structured Notion reports
An n8n workflow scrapes Reddit posts and comments via Bright Data, extracts concerns and themes with Gemini, and writes reports to Notion.
Monitor public documents for changes affecting teaching materials
An educator's Dot checks public documents for changes, sorts them by impact, and verifies an article's notation against linked pages, offering revision candidates only.
Monitor tech subreddits and competitors, draft emails and articles
Commenters use Cowork daily to scan Reddit tech subreddits for work items, monitor competitors and markets, generate articles and draft emails.
Produce a sourced research document with parallel agents
Grok coordinated 16 specialized agents that searched and parsed 896 sources, debated and peer reviewed, and delivered a complete research document in one minute.
Produce cited research briefs with simulated peer review
Feynman multi-agent system searches papers and the web, synthesizes findings, runs simulated peer review, verifies citations, and outputs a cited brief.
Query 600 GB of Hacker News, arXiv, and LessWrong in plain English
Claude Code writes the SQL and vector queries against a public read-only index, and can set email alerts for nuanced criteria.
Research a blog post with Claude computer use with Claude computer use
The author used Claude computer use with Claude in Chrome to research the post itself, suggesting starting with a logged-in site and a specific lookup.
Research a person and write a bio
An Inc. writer had Muse research them via its browser and write a bio, but objected that it accessed private messages unasked.
Research AI training case studies and build a summary deck
A team had Agent Mode research case studies from McKinsey, PwC and similar firms and make a slide deck in 32 minutes, with some image and overlapping text issues.
Research and benchmark competitors into a deck and spreadsheet
ChatGPT Agent mode researched the top 5 UK coffee subscription companies, benchmarked their USPs, and produced a deck and spreadsheet from one prompt in 18 minutes.
Research and compare SaaS tools and refactor Python
Reviewers had Manus find the top 10 project management tools, compare pricing in a table, and refactor a 400-line Python script that ran cleanly.
Research and download scientific papers with a browser agent
A commenter built a custom browser agent to research and download scientific papers, and also uses browser agents for controlled data entry.
Research and draft a social science paper with Deep Research
Author used ChatGPT Deep Research and Agent Mode for research help and writing assistance while writing an academic social science paper.
Research conference speakers and organize tabs
Comet researched 50 HumanX speakers, surfaced themes and podcast guests, built a camera spec table, and cleaned up tabs.
Research content from Slack and draft Notion guide ideas
A team DM'd Lindy in Slack to summarize a year of guides and research a model, and it created a Notion guide idea after asking for approval.
Research laptops and build a comparison table and deck
The reviewer had ChatGPT Agent research budget laptops over about 30 minutes; research was decent but the deck looked cheap. It also built a multi-tab Excel file.
Research on X, summarize YouTube transcripts, build decks
@Tape_Vector uses Comet for X research, summarizing YouTube video transcripts and building presentations.
Research Reddit customer pain points with a skill
The author replaced a Reddit research agent with a Codex skill that finds pain points, verifies communities, collects evidence, clusters problems, and analyzes commercial signals.
Research stocks by pulling filings and transcripts
The poster has Claude Code fetch filings, transcripts and SEC documents for a company, cite sources, and write a bear case on a holding.
Research the web visually by browsing pages
A commenter uses ChatGPT Agent Mode for visual web research, with the agent opening and working through pages.
Research US stablecoin adoption with an agent
A Manus agent connected to Heurist's mesh ran deep research on US stablecoin adoption in 2026 after one approval step, finishing in two minutes.
Reverse-engineer a book file format to search it with Claude
After the RAG indexer crashed on an uploaded book, Claude used Unix commands to work out the file format and grep the book manually.
Run a systematic literature review from one prompt
SciSpace's agent generates PICO questions, searches and screens papers, downloads PDFs, extracts data and outputs the full review with a PRISMA diagram.
Run a weekly competitive-monitoring briefing for product management
A product manager had Hermes produce a weekly competitor briefing; its skill rewrote itself four times and by week six surfaced patterns he had missed manually.
Run academic literature reviews from seed papers
Poster built an agent skill that starts from seed papers, searches backward and forward, screens candidates, and iteratively refines a literature review.
Run data cleaning to executive summary with agent pipeline
Built five Claude Code agents (cleaner, analyzer, visualizer, report writer, summarizer) chained by an orchestrator for end-to-end data analysis.
Run first-pass topic research, then verify references
A commenter uses Manus for first-pass research, then has Genspark double-check every reference and flag problems.
Run multi-step social media research on a cloud computer
Reviewers used Grok Bot's cloud computer and X data for multi-step social-media research they found useful, work previously split across tools.
Run persistent financial research with an agent
LangAlpha is a Claude Code-style agent for investing research that keeps persistent workspaces and memory so analysis such as models and comps can be updated across sessions.
Run research workflows with specialized bot agents
A setup of 10 specialized Grok Bot agents includes a Research agent that finds sources and data and a Deep Research agent that compares sources into insights.
Run scheduled AI deep research on stock watchlists
A reply describes daily and weekly cron jobs running AI deep research on watchlists and monitoring company events and insider activity.
Run systematic literature reviews with a research agent
Poster recommends a research-focused tool that does systematic review (slow but strong), adds notes to papers, and builds a research project over time.
Run web research jobs and capture screenshots into a doc
A reviewer tested Operator on analyzing web-design posts, summarizing AI news, listing website builders with prices and screenshotting sites into a Google Doc, finding login and CAPTCHA handoffs frustrating.
Save and search links via a Telegram second brain
An n8n Telegram agent reads links sent to it, summarises and categorises them into Google Sheets, and answers questions from the library using Supabase semantic search.
Scrape a conference site into a searchable dashboard
In a workshop demo, a Manus agent scraped about 70 talks, extracted schedules, converted times to UTC, and built a dashboard with recommendations and calendar integration.
Scrape weekly Substack rankings and write a report
Claude in Chrome runs weekly to scrape Substack ranking data into a dataset, and Cowork analyzes it and writes a weekly report.
Screen research papers against criteria
Codex reads a folder of PDFs to find articles that disagree with an argument, screens about fifty papers for a systematic review, and cleans messy CSV or Excel files.
Search literature and write notes into Zotero with Claude
A researcher uses Claude to search Google Scholar, follow citations, query a Zotero library in natural language, and write summary notes into Zotero or Obsidian.
Search years of research files in an Obsidian vault
Claude Code, guided by a CLAUDE.md, searches research papers, scans and PDFs via Spotlight, extracts text, and files daily notes in dated folders.
Send a daily AI news digest on a schedule
A Manus scheduled task searches Reddit, X and Hacker News each morning, ranks results and delivers a digest to email or Notion; a how-to guide.
Send daily AI news research reports
Grok Bot reads X and AI news every few hours, checks sourced figures, and sends five written research reports a day.
Speed up a thesis literature review with ChatGPT
Author used ChatGPT to summarize and structure a thesis literature review, and tried a tool that builds summaries from real papers to avoid invented citations.
Summarize 20 articles into a cited document
An agent extracted key insights from 20 articles, found common themes and produced a cited summary; the write-up estimates 18 minutes versus hours by hand.
Summarize a YouTuber's latest video into a Google Doc daily
A Make scenario runs at 9 AM, finds a YouTuber's newest video, has Hugging Face summarize it, and appends the summary to a Google Doc.
Summarize months of notes in Logseq via CLI agent
User points Codex at the Logseq CLI docs so it can query and summarize journals and tagged job-application and project pages.
Summarize new arXiv papers into notes with scheduled agents
Scheduled scripts produce a daily arXiv digest, and a nightly script launches Claude Code agents to summarize each saved PDF into a notes folder.
Summarize non-obvious methods file by file in a paper project
A commenter had Claude Code write file-by-file summaries of non-obvious methods in a research project, then reviewed them to keep track of the work.
Summarize Reddit threads before writing code
The poster built an MCP server so Claude Code summarizes about 30 Reddit threads in around 10 seconds as research before coding.
Survey AI product names with a swarm of search agents
The author had a swarm of Claude agents run 4,654 searches to catalog AI bot names and analyze naming trends by gender, industry and year.
Synthesize interview transcripts and PDFs for research
Claude Code is pointed at transcripts and PDFs to produce theme summaries, evidence tables and annotated bibliographies; a UX researcher runs 50-transcript studies this way.
Track competitor prices and contacts into Google Sheets with Claude
A Claude-powered scraper agent monitors competitor sites hourly, pulling pricing, company details and contacts into Google Sheets, replacing manual research.
Track daily arXiv papers into a Notion database
An n8n workflow fetches arXiv papers daily for a keyword, summarizes them with Gemini 2.5 Flash, writes them to Notion and sends Feishu and Gmail notifications.
Try Devin on research tasks (mostly failed)
Answer.AI had Devin fetch an author's recent papers and research transcript summarization; it got stuck parsing HTML and returned generic results, rated a failure.
Turn any URL into a structured Notion note
An n8n workflow fetches a submitted URL, strips it to readable content, has OpenAI summarise it into structured fields, and saves a Notion note.
Turn voice notes into structured Obsidian notes
Voice notes sent over Telegram become Obsidian thought notes with transcript, cleaned argument, linked context and a draft; Hermes also tracks recipes.
Turn YouTube videos into cited research notes
The author uses Claude Code with NotebookLM and Obsidian to turn 20 videos into cited notes, audio overviews, a knowledge graph and flashcards.
Use a persistent assistant for student research and daily tasks
A student used a named dot for ongoing research and daily tasks with persistent context across chats, set up for email.
Use Cursor for academic paper writing with citations
Forum users write papers in markdown with Zotero citations and a bibtex file for Cursor to pick references from, converting to Word with pandoc.