What does a Research Analyst FTE own?
A Research Analyst FTE owns the synthesis step of research: taking scattered sources and producing a brief that a decision-maker can read in minutes. It is accountable for a consistent structure, a citation on every claim, and honest gaps where the sources run out.
It does not own the research question or the decision. You set the question and provide or approve the sources; it does the reading, structuring, and citing.
What goes in and what comes out?
Input is whatever you have: uploaded PDFs, spreadsheets, annual reports, analyst notes, news links, and internal documents. The Research Analyst FTE reads across all of them for the question you set.
Output is a brief in a fixed structure: key trends, company or market snapshots, strategic implications, and open questions, with a citation on every claim pointing to the source document and where in it the claim came from. Because the structure is fixed, briefs on different topics or from different weeks can be compared directly.
How does citation work?
Every factual claim in the brief cites the source it came from, down to the document and section or page. A reader who doubts a claim can go straight to the source rather than asking where it came from.
Claims that synthesise across several sources cite all of them. Claims that rest on inference rather than a source are marked as inference, so the reader knows which sentences are reporting and which are interpretation.
- Sourced claim: document, section or page cited
- Synthesised claim: every contributing source cited
- Inferred claim: marked as inference with the reasoning
- Missing: stated as a gap, never filled
What happens when sources disagree?
When sources disagree, the Research Analyst FTE flags the disagreement and presents both positions with their citations rather than picking one silently or averaging them. A market-size figure that differs between two reports appears as two figures with two sources and a note on why they might differ.
This is one of the main reasons to use a structured synthesis rather than a summary. Summaries tend to smooth over disagreement; a brief that surfaces it tells the reader where the uncertainty actually is.
What does it not do?
It does not invent what the sources do not contain. If the question asks about a market the documents do not cover, the brief says so and lists what would be needed. It does not browse for sources you have not provided or approved, unless that is part of its remit.
It also does not decide. The strategic implications section proposes what the findings might mean, labelled as interpretation, and the person who set the question decides what to do with them. Missions include recurring briefs on a cadence, such as a weekly competitor snapshot, and one-off deep reads of a large document set.
What does a Research Analyst FTE cost, and what does it need from you?
A Research Analyst FTE consumes tokens in proportion to what it reads and writes: a deep read of a large document set for a one-off brief costs more than a weekly snapshot from a fixed source list, and both are bounded by its per-FTE budget and visible in the morning brief. It usually runs on a higher model tier because synthesis across many sources is judgement-heavy, and the tier is set in Setup with honest labels. Reading a brief costs nothing.
What it needs from you is the question, the sources, and the structure. The question should be specific enough to answer; a brief on a vague question is a vague brief. The sources are the documents you upload or approve, with any licence terms on research-firm reports checked first, and the FTE does not go beyond them unless its remit allows. The structure is fixed by default, key trends, snapshots, implications, open questions, and can be adjusted in the remit once, after which every brief follows it, which is what makes briefs comparable across weeks and topics.