Research and comparison
Research is where an agent pays off fastest. It can search the web, read pages and documents, and pull what it finds into a table. You can watch the pages it opens in the right-hand panel.
Remember that your chat is a manager, not one assistant. One person researching eight suppliers takes a day. A manager hands one supplier to each of eight staff and has the answers back together. Ask for the job that way.
Comparing suppliers
Your office cleaning contract ends next month. You want a shortlist of local companies with prices and terms.
Find six commercial cleaning companies that service our suburb. Give each one to a separate helper, working at the same time. For each, find prices, minimum contract length, insurance and recent reviews, with a link for every figure. If a price is not published, write "not published", do not estimate. Put it all in one table and save it as a spreadsheet in this chat's files.
Check: open two or three of the links and make sure the figure is really there. Look for "from" prices passed off as real quotes.
Helps: subagents for the parallel work, and Chat files so the spreadsheet is saved for everyone in the chat.
A market overview with two opinions
Your manager asks what similar businesses charge for a service you are thinking of offering.
Have one Claude helper and one GPT helper research this separately, without seeing each other's work: what do businesses like ours charge for after-hours IT support, and what is included? Then show me where they agree and where they differ, with sources.
Check: the places they disagree. That is where a source is old, a figure is from another country, or one of them guessed.
Helps: subagents from different model families. Families searching on their own find different sources, so agreement means more.
Choosing between options
You need new booking software and have three demos lined up over the next few weeks.
We need booking software for 12 staff. Must-haves: online payments, text reminders, works on phones, under $200 a month. Compare these three against those must-haves only, show what each costs for us, and tell me what would change your recommendation.
Check: that it judged them on your must-haves, not on a generic list of features. "What would change your recommendation" shows you how firm the answer is.
Helps: a project. Put each demo's notes and quote in its own chat inside one project, and every chat can read the files saved in the others.