AI for research, documents and spreadsheets: answers you can check

People say “I asked AI” as if it were one activity. For research and paperwork it is really three, and each has a tool that suits it.

• Finding out something new, such as what a regulation requires or how competitors price a service. You want answers with sources you can open.
• Understanding documents you already have, such as a contract, a tender or a 60-page report. You want answers taken only from those pages.
• Working with numbers, such as a sales export or a staff rota. You want formulas and summaries you can test.

Mixing these up is where most mistakes come from. A general assistant asked about your contract without the contract in front of it will guess.

For anything factual, use a tool that searches the web and shows where each statement came from. Then do the part most people skip: click two or three of the sources and check they say what the answer claims.

Good research prompts are narrow and say what you will do with the answer:

• “What do UK food businesses have to display about allergens on a menu? Use official UK sources and link each one.”
• “List five recruitment agencies in Leeds that specialise in hospitality, with their website and what they say about fees. Say where each fact came from.”
• “Summarise what changed in this guidance since last year. If you are not sure, say so.”

For law, tax, health and money, treat the answer as a briefing before you speak to a professional, not as the advice itself.

Upload the document and tell the assistant to answer only from it. This one instruction removes most invented answers, because the tool has to point at a passage.

• “Using only this contract, what is the notice period, and what happens to prices at renewal? Quote the clause.”
• “Compare these three supplier quotes in a table: price, what is included, delivery time, payment terms. Mark anything one quote leaves out.”
• “List every deadline and obligation on us in this tender document, with the page number.”
• “Explain this section in plain English, as if to someone who has never read a lease.”

NotebookLM is built for this: you add your sources and every answer links back to the passage it used. It can also turn a set of documents into a spoken summary you can listen to. Before uploading, check whether the file contains personal data or anything confidential, and whether your plan is suitable for it.

You do not need to remember formula names. Describe your columns and what you want to know:

• “Column A is the date, B is the customer, C is the amount. Give me a formula for total sales per customer for this month.”
• “This list has duplicates with slightly different spellings. How do I find and merge them?”
• “Here is an export from my booking system. Which three months were busiest, and by how much?”

Then test it. Check the formula against a few rows you can add up by hand. Assistants are good at formulas and less dependable when asked to do long sums in their head, so ask for the formula, or ask it to show its working.

An AI assistant writes the most plausible next sentence. Usually plausible and true are the same thing. When they are not, it produces a confident answer that happens to be false, sometimes with a reference that does not exist. This is often called hallucination.

Three habits keep you safe: give it the source material, ask it to quote or link what it relied on, and check anything that would be expensive to get wrong.