The Scenario
You're a VC analyst at an early-stage fund and your partner just handed you a workbook with 10 emerging technology topics — things like "autonomous drone logistics" and "AI-native ERP systems" — with a note attached: "Need a research brief on each before the LP call Thursday."
It's Tuesday.
You've written research briefs from scratch before. Each one takes two to three hours when done properly: finding authoritative sources, synthesizing competing perspectives, citing your claims, structuring the output so an LP can scan it in five minutes. Ten briefs by Thursday is not a Tuesday-evening problem. It's a Wednesday-morning crisis.
The bad version:
- Open your browser, start searching for "autonomous drone logistics market overview," wade through SEO-optimized noise, open 8 tabs, read all of them
- Synthesize what you found into a 4-paragraph brief, write the citations manually, paste it into the workbook
- Do this 9 more times, watching your available research hours evaporate
The LP call is the point. The research briefs are supposed to enable that conversation, not consume the days before it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands your data, and through its built-in Exa integration it can run deep research jobs for each topic in your list — pulling authoritative sources, synthesizing findings, and writing structured briefs with citations directly back to your workbook.
For each topic in column A of my Excel workbook, create an Exa research task, wait for completion, and write the markdown research brief to column B and the citation list to column C
What You Get
- Column B fills with a structured markdown brief for each topic — typically 3-5 paragraphs with headers
- Column C receives a list of citation URLs used to generate the brief
- Topics where Exa's research returned limited sources are flagged so you know which ones need supplemental manual research
- Output is formatted for direct copy-paste into a deck or memo without cleanup
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Topic descriptions in column A are too vague
Some topics are listed as single words without enough context for Exa to know what angle to research.
Before running research, expand each topic in column A into a full research question — write the expanded question to column B, then run the Exa deep research job on column B and write the brief to column C and citations to column D
You want briefs structured to a specific format
LP materials at your fund follow a standard structure: Market Size, Key Players, Recent Developments, Risks.
For each topic in column A, run an Exa deep research job and write the output as a structured markdown brief with the following sections: Market Size, Key Players, Recent Developments, and Key Risks — write the full brief to column B and citations to column C
Some topics are duplicates or closely related
Your workbook has "AI ERP" and "AI-native ERP systems" as separate rows. Running separate research jobs on them wastes time.
Before running research, check column A for topics that are substantially similar — mark near-duplicates with "See row X" in column B — then run Exa research only for the unique topics and write briefs to column C and citations to column D
Full pipeline: expand vague topics, deduplicate, research, structure output
Expand each topic in column A into a specific research question in column B, check for near-duplicate questions and mark them in column C, then run an Exa deep research job for each unique question and write a structured markdown brief with sections for Market Size, Key Players, Recent Developments, and Risks to column D, with citations in column E
Thursday's LP call, handled Tuesday afternoon.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with your research topic list — even a rough one — then ask it to run Exa deep research briefs for each row. For related workflows, see how to run bulk company research with citations or enrich a prospect list with web-sourced data.