Deep Research: The Best AI Product from OpenAI Since ChatGPT
Deep Research is a game changer for PMs. Here's my guide on what it's great at, how to get the most out of it, and a free alternative
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a guide on using Deep Research — the best AI product from OpenAI since the original ChatGPT.
Deep Research is an AI agent that finds and synthesizes information from 100s of online sources to create a comprehensive report. So let’s dive into:
What Deep Research is great at (and what it's not)
My AI prompt to generate comprehensive reports every time
Cheaper alternatives if the $200 price tag is too steep
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What Deep Research is great at (and what it's not)
I paid $200 for ChatGPT’s Deep Research because I wanted to ramp up on a new market and product space quickly. It exceeded my expectations for:
Market and competitive research. I asked Deep Research to help me understand the A/B testing space for a new product that I’m building. It gave me a detailed report on market trends, best practices, and the competitive landscape:
Technical deep dives. I asked Deep Research to give me a primer on the typical tech stack for experimentation platforms. It provided an excellent report that helped me ramp up quickly.
Deep Research isn't perfect, however. I’ve found it less reliable for personalized recommendations. For example, I asked it to give me restaurant recommendations for my upcoming trip to Japan:
It gave me an incredibly comprehensive report of restaurants in Rome instead:
So tl:dr — incredible for research, not as great for personalized recommendations.
My advanced AI workflow to generate comprehensive reports every time
Deep Research creates decent reports with casual prompts. But you can get it to generate comprehensive, thoroughly researched reports every time with the right prompt.
The trick is to use another AI reasoning model to create instructions for Deep Research.
Let me show you exactly how to do this by getting Deep Research to write a comprehensive report for this question that I’m sure we’ve all been wondering about:
Tell me how product, design, and engineering teams will evolve as AI agents become the norm. How can people skill up to prepare?I’ll also link the report it generates and share a free alternative to Deep Research if you can’t afford the $200.
Ok, here’s how it works. Paste the prompt and guidelines below into another AI (ideally a reasoning model like O1 Pro) to generate the prompt for Deep Research: