The search use case was a big component of what drew me to AI as a former strategy consultant.

As a consultant, so much of your time is spent, yes, moving around logos in PPT and changing colors for your partner's ~value add~ comment (wrote more why I left here). But outside of that, it's consistently searching for stuff:

• Searching for the latest news about a company

• Searching for contacts to reach out to interview/have convos with

• Search for different research reports to back a thesis you and your client have

• List goes on

Search functionality is important not only for consultants but also for almost every knowledge worker.

This value drew demand from some of the most innovative companies. Wave 1 was Google, Wave 2 was the likes of Algolia, and now Wave 3 is the companies doing this for the AI layer (Hebbia for financial services, for one).

Three that come to mind are Perplexity, Exa, and Parallel - these apps are specifically in the search app and API space for AI. If you aren't incorporating these tools into your GTM workflow, you should start doing it immediately.

There are so many search use cases for GTM, especially sales:

• Pre-call research before you speak with a prospect

• Finding customer reviews to use in presentations/discovery

• Finding the right/hard-to-find ICPs at accounts

• Recent product/funding updates

• + so many more

While the general LLMs great for email writing (Claude is the best here), all these general LLMs lack the real-time search component needed for those tasks above. You should be using these together to fill in where the other lacks.

I'll break down an overview of the big two, Perplexity and Exa, below. Oh, I’ll be mentioning quite a bit of tools below, so more on those at a high level can be found here:

Perplexity

I’ve been using Perplexity instead of Google Search for the last ~9 months and it’s been magic. I love it so much, I applied and got into the Perplexity Business Fellowship which starts this Friday.

I’m using it in a bunch of ways personally, but professionally can be broken down into three:

1) Pre-call research

I love putting the prompt below into Perplexity for pre-call research:

You are a world-class McKinsey business consultant and researcher. I work at Company (companyadomain.com), and have an intro call with Company B (companybdomain.com). Please help me better understand what the company does, how it makes money, recent funding, recent product launches, [other relevant news based on your company’s value prompt], leadership quotes from the last 3 months of what they care about, etc. Please be overly detailed here.

You want it to be overly detailed so it gives you a ton of info and Claude can refine.

You can then put the answer Perplexity gives you into Claude to help synthesize it all and start using that Claude context window into a deal coach of sorts. Put the result from Perplexity and this prompt into Claude:

You are a world-class sales coach and business writer. I have a first call with [company B], and I work at [company A]. Attached is detail about the company, please synthesize this for me and give me an overview of the company and what they care about based on the problems my company solves for.

Then, after the call, stay in that same Claude window and paste your Gong/Granola notes for even more context, and then can help with post-call follow-up:

Attached is a transcript of a first call I had with [company B]. Please review it and write me up a follow-up email with 1) key points and 2) next steps. Write it business casual and make it concise.

And then boom - this easy workflow has saved me so much time and has allowed me to be super prepared prior to calls.

To see more, I did a quick Loom video here as I walk through it or watch below:

2) Clay <> Perplexity Partnership/API

• Future article here on how I’m using Clay for account planning, but what’s great about the integration is the ability to pull recent news/data for accounts and use that in messaging

  • Once you have accounts enriched, you can run a Perplexity API call to get you real-time search detail that you can then use in outreach which has been awesome

  • More info on the integration here

3) Building apps in Replit to do this myself

• See article of me building this here (video here) using the Perplexity APIs, or see the video below

• Pretty much a more automated way to do #1 above

Exa

Exa is a newer player in the space. I’ve been hearing from developers I work with for months that their API is getting close to that of Perplexity’s and a strong second player.

It looks like they’re now in Clay which is sweet (you can use it for a strong company lookalike use case and I would assume to pull search data similar to Perplexity). They were definitely API first (didn’t have an app), but this changed a couple months ago with their launch of Websets.

• Cool use cases for sales, recruiting, VCs, founders, etc.

• As a former dating app founder, I thought this use case was hilarious and awesome

See a Loom of me here walking through an Exa <> Clay Use Case

Sick product - wouldn’t shock me if you start seeing a lot more from them in the future.

Would love to hear more from readers on how they’re using these tools, and if there are others we should be trialing/incorporating into common GTM workflows.

Cheers,

Chris

[email protected]