The Scenario
Three months ago, your data team exported 100 company names from your CRM into a Google Sheet. The goal was to tag each one with a canonical name and a Perigon entity ID so your news monitoring queries would match correctly — even when press coverage uses a slightly different spelling or a trade name.
Nobody got to it. The sheet has been sitting with just the raw CRM names in column A.
This week your director asked why the news monitoring dashboard is missing coverage for several accounts. You pull up the sheet. Half the company names are unvalidated. That's why.
The bad version:
- Search each company name in Perigon's entity lookup manually. Find the match. Copy the canonical name. Paste into column B. Copy the entity ID. Paste into column C.
- Do that 100 times. Discover that 18 names don't match cleanly — they need judgment calls about which Perigon entity is the right one.
- Spend another hour resolving the ambiguous cases and flagging them for review.
You're supposed to be maintaining a data pipeline, not doing lookup work that a system should handle.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It connects to Perigon's company entity database and writes canonical names and entity IDs back into your sheet — one row at a time, across the whole list.
For each company name in column A, look it up in Perigon's company entity database and write the matched canonical name and Perigon entity ID into columns B and C.
What You Get
- Columns B and C populated for every company Perigon can match.
- Column B: canonical company name as Perigon records it. Column C: Perigon entity ID.
- Rows where Perigon finds no clear match are left blank — no guesses, no false positives.
- The 100-row lookup runs in one pass, not over an afternoon.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Company names have inconsistent formatting
For each company name in column A, clean the name by trimming extra spaces and removing legal suffixes like "Inc", "LLC", or "Ltd". Look up the cleaned name in Perigon's entity database. Write the canonical name into column B and the entity ID into column C.
You only want to validate rows where the ID column is still empty
For each row in the Companies sheet where column C is blank, look up the company name from column A in Perigon's entity database. Write the canonical name into column B and the entity ID into column C.
You want to flag low-confidence matches for review
For each company name in column A, look it up in Perigon's entity database. Write the canonical name into column B and entity ID into column C. If the match confidence from Perigon is below 0.8, mark column D with "review".
Clean the names, validate against Perigon, flag ambiguous matches, and summarize in one pass
For each row in column A, trim the company name and remove common legal suffixes. Look up the cleaned name in Perigon's entity database. Write canonical name and entity ID into columns B and C. Flag low-confidence matches in column D as "review". Count the number of validated rows and unmatched rows and write both totals to the Summary sheet in cells A2 and A3.
Ask for name cleaning, validation, flagging, and summarization in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a list of company names from a CRM export or research dataset, then ask it to validate them against the Perigon entity database. See the full Perigon integration overview or explore building a research brief using Perigon and Wikipedia.