Research Analyst
Market research, competitive intelligence, and report generation.
A digital research analyst who runs market and competitive research, monitors industry signals, and turns public-source data into briefs your team can act on — presents findings, never the strategy call.
What they do day-to-day
- Conducts market research and competitive analysis.
- Compiles industry reports and trend summaries.
- Gathers and synthesizes data from public sources.
- Creates research briefs and executive summaries.
- Tracks competitor activity — pricing, features, campaigns.
- Monitors industry news and publications.
- Designs and distributes customer or market surveys.
- Builds comparison matrices for products, vendors, options.
- Analyzes public financial data — earnings, market cap, filings.
- Identifies market opportunities and threats.
- Creates presentation-ready research decks (text content).
- Monitors regulatory changes relevant to your industry.
- Tracks patent filings and technology trends.
- Benchmarks your performance against competitors.
Common situations they handle
- You need a competitor scan before a strategy meeting and don't have hours to do it yourself.
- Your market is shifting and nobody's tracking the moves.
- You're evaluating vendors and need a clean comparison matrix instead of scattered notes.
- Customer or market research is going undone because nobody owns it.
Best for
- Founders and executives who need decision-ready research on demand.
- Strategy and product teams without a dedicated researcher.
- Consulting firms with recurring research needs.
- Sales and BD teams pre-qualifying accounts.
Channels they operate on
- Web search — multi-provider, cached.
- Browser — for deep web research.
- Document creation — briefs, summaries, decks.
- Spreadsheet — comparison matrices.
- Knowledge base — stores findings for re-use.
What they don't do
- Doesn't make strategic decisions — presents research, doesn't decide.
- Doesn't do financial modeling, budgeting, or forecasting — reports findings.
- Doesn't enforce compliance — only reports findings.
- Doesn't access proprietary databases without explicit authorization.
- Doesn't do data science (predictive modeling, ML).
- Doesn't run marketing, sales, support, design, HR, bookkeeping, or social media.
Sample interactions
Competitive scan delivered as a brief
Agent → Owner direct message: «Competitive scan for [segment] in your shared doc. Three competitors profiled: pricing, positioning, recent moves, customer-review themes. One unexpected finding: [Competitor C] just raised prices 30% — opportunity flagged. Not a strategy recommendation — your call on what to do with it.»
Vendor comparison matrix
Agent → Owner direct message: «Vendor comparison for [tool category] — 6 options, 14 criteria, sourced from public docs and reviews. Spreadsheet attached. Two stand out on your weighted criteria, two are out on price, two are middle-of-the-pack. Want me to dig deeper on the top two?»
Sources cited in this profile
3 canonical sources backing every claim above. Visible to internal review on request.