I don't know when all of these were set up, but it seems like in the last couple of weeks. Just insane.

AI can make prospect research much faster, but speed is not the most important change. The better opportunity is to ask a more precise question than a static database filter can express—and still receive an answer another person can inspect.

This guide shows how to structure that request across companies, people, existing CRM accounts, markets, and public projects, then verify the result before it influences a record or next action.

The Practical Definition

AI prospect research is not limited to finding net-new leads. It can build a list, enrich existing CRM accounts, profile a public company, compare projects or markets, or investigate another structured public-web question. Define the task, subject, criteria, output fields, and evidence you expect back, then verify every result against its source before using it.

The prompts in this guide are illustrative, not an exhaustive menu of supported searches. Try the free AI Lead Finder with a request such as:

>Find AI infrastructure companies hiring founding designers. Include the company, what it builds, the relevant job opening, and a source for the hiring signal.

What Is AI Prospect Research?

AI prospect research is the use of search and language models to find, enrich, profile, or compare companies, people, markets, and projects, then organize the public evidence behind each result.

It is different from asking a contact database for every software company in a given employee range. A research request can combine criteria that live in different places:

• A company’s category or product focus
• Its funding stage
• A current role on its hiring page
• A leadership title shown on a public profile
• A technology or open-source project it maintains
• A geographic constraint
• A recent activity signal
• Firmographic fields for an existing CRM account
• Public company news, web-traffic evidence, or another profile signal
• A possible buying trigger that must remain separate from verified intent

Modern prospecting platforms increasingly emphasize funding, hiring, leadership, and technology changes as useful timing signals. For example, Signalbase describes funding and hiring activity as searchable company signals, while Origami focuses on combining signals such as recent funding with hiring in a specific department.

The important distinction is that a signal is evidence to investigate—not proof that a company will buy.

Why Static Filters Are Often Not Enough

Structured databases are excellent when the question maps cleanly to their columns:

>Show software companies in the United States with 50–200 employees.

They become less effective when the real request is closer to this:

>Find Series A AI companies whose product needs enterprise positioning and that have recently hired, or are hiring, a senior marketing leader.

That request requires interpretation and current public evidence. “AI company” may be described on the company site, the funding stage may appear in an announcement, and the leadership signal may be found on a team or careers page.

AI research can connect those pieces, but only if the output preserves where each claim came from.

The Six Parts of a Strong Research Prompt

Use this structure:

Part	Question	Example
Task	What should the research do?	Build, enrich, profile, compare, investigate
Subject	What should each row or report cover?	Company, person, project, or existing account
Stable criteria	What must be consistently true?	AI infrastructure; Series A; United States
Current signal	What recent evidence matters?	Hiring a founding designer
Required fields	What should the result contain?	Name, role/category, URL, signal
Verification	What evidence must accompany the result?	Public source, date, and concise fit note

A reusable prompt template is:

>[Task] [subject or existing records] using [stable criteria] and [current signal]. For each result, include [required fields] and link to [evidence requirement]. Mark unknowns and exclude claims that cannot be verified.

Example 1: People by Role and Company Stage

>Find CMOs at Series A AI startups in the United States. Include the person, company, public role source, funding-stage source, and a short note explaining the match.

This is stronger than “find AI CMOs” because it defines both the person and company conditions and asks for proof of each.

Open this people-and-stage example in the Lead Finder →

Example 2: Companies Showing a Hiring Signal

>Find AI infrastructure companies hiring founding designers. Include company name, product category, careers or job URL, date or recency signal, and a concise fit note.

The job opening is the time-sensitive part. It should be checked again immediately before using the result because openings close and role descriptions change.

Open this hiring-signal example in the Lead Finder →

Example 3: Open-Source Market Research

>Compare eight durable open-source AI infrastructure projects for building LLM applications. For each, include project name, primary category, GitHub URL, latest release or activity signal, and a concise fit note.

This is not a conventional sales-lead request, but it uses the same research discipline. “Durable” needs an observable definition such as recent releases, continuing commits, responsive maintainers, multiple contributors, or an active issue queue. Research on open-source maintenance likewise treats repository activity as a useful—but imperfect—indicator of project health (Coelho et al.).

Open this project-research example in the Lead Finder →

Example 4: Enrich Existing CRM Accounts

>Enrich these 25 CRM accounts with website, headquarters, employee count, latest funding or company status, and a concise account-specific buying trigger. For each value, include the most current public evidence available, record the source date, and mark unknowns rather than guessing.

This begins with records the team already has. It is an enrichment and prioritization task, not net-new list building. Employee counts can be estimates, company status can change, and a buying trigger is an evidence-backed hypothesis—not proof of purchase intent.

Example 5: Profile a Public Company

>Profile [company] using its official website, public web-traffic evidence, and recent company news. Include the source, date, observed trend or event, and a concise note explaining why it may matter.

A company profile can be a single-company report rather than a list. Web-traffic figures should name the measurement source and whether the number is an estimate; “latest news” should include an event date, not only a publication date.

Other Valid Request Shapes

The same structure can support many other questions, including people with a specific career-history pattern, companies in a precise category and funding stage, account research before a meeting, technology adoption evidence, or a comparison of public projects. The limiting factor is whether the question can be answered responsibly from available public evidence—not whether it matches one of the examples above.

Coherence Lead Finder

Turn a precise brief into research you can inspect

Ask for companies, people, accounts, markets, or projects with the fields and public evidence your decision actually requires.

Try the free Lead Finder

How to Verify the Results

AI can accelerate discovery, but verification remains a human responsibility.

For worked examples, continue with:

• How to Find Companies Hiring for a Specific Role
• How to Find Series A Startups by Industry and Role
• How to Compare Open-Source AI Projects Using GitHub Activity
• How to Enrich CRM Accounts with Firmographics and Buying Signals
• How to Build a Public Company Profile with Web Traffic and Recent News

1. Open the Evidence

Confirm that the source actually supports the claim. A search-result snippet is not enough when the underlying page says something different.

2. Check the Date

Funding stages, leadership roles, hiring pages, and repository activity all change. Record when you checked the source and prefer first-party evidence where practical.

3. Separate Fact from Inference

“The company is hiring a founding designer” may be directly supported by a job page. “The company urgently needs design help” is an inference. Keep those statements separate.

4. Look for a Second Source on Important Claims

Use corroboration when the cost of being wrong is high. A company announcement plus a reputable funding report is stronger than an isolated directory entry.

5. Reject Ambiguous Matches

Do not keep a row just to reach an arbitrary list size. A shortlist of eight well-supported matches is more useful than 25 names padded with adjacent companies.

Common Failure Modes

Vague Targeting

“Find promising AI startups” leaves “promising,” “AI,” and “startup” undefined. Replace subjective words with observable criteria.

Asking for Private Data

Public research does not guarantee a verified email address, direct phone number, or private identity data. Ask for public profiles and official sources, then use an appropriate permission-based process for contact data.

Treating a Signal as Intent

A funding round creates capacity. A hiring post shows an active role. Neither proves purchasing intent. Signals help prioritize research; they do not replace qualification.

Hiding the Source

A polished answer without evidence is hard to trust and impossible to refresh. Require a source per row.

Automating Action Before Review

Do not turn a research result directly into autonomous outreach. Verify the company or person, decide whether the fit is real, and choose the next step deliberately.

Where Coherence Fits

The Coherence AI Lead Finder accepts a natural-language request and researches current public sources. It can build lists, enrich existing CRM accounts, profile companies, compare markets or projects, and answer other structured research questions. Its useful difference is not that it returns the largest possible list. It is that the request can contain multiple specific conditions and the results carry evidence that can be inspected.

Eligible structured results can then be carried into the same workspace where the team manages accounts, leads, projects, notes, tasks, and custom records. Existing accounts can also be enriched with researched fields when the workflow supplies the records and desired output. If the standard CRM shape does not fit the research, the custom CRM guide explains how to model additional entities and relationships. Coherence does not promise that every public fact is complete or current, and it does not guarantee private contact information. The source is there so you can make that judgment yourself.

See the Coherence platform

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AI prospect research the same as lead generation?

Not exactly. Lead generation is the broader process of creating potential sales opportunities. Prospect research is the evidence-gathering step used to identify and qualify possible companies or people.

Can AI find companies based on hiring activity?

Yes, when a public careers page, job post, or other reliable source exposes the role. Because openings change quickly, verify the job immediately before acting on it.

Can AI find people at a specific funding stage?

It can connect public role evidence with public company-funding evidence. Both parts should be sourced; a job title alone does not prove the company stage.

Can AI enrich accounts already in my CRM?

Yes. Supply the account list and the fields you want researched, such as website, headquarters, employee count, latest funding or status, and a possible buying trigger. Require a source and date for each value, and allow unknowns because public evidence is often incomplete.

Should this replace a contact database?

Usually not. Databases are efficient for broad, standardized filters. AI research is useful for narrow combinations, current signals, and questions that require interpreting public evidence. Many teams will use both.

What should I do with an uncertain result?

Exclude it or mark it for additional research. Uncertainty should remain visible rather than being converted into a confident-looking score.

Ready to test a precise research question? Run it in the free AI Lead Finder. No signup is required to see the initial results.

Originally posted at: https://getcoherence.io/blog/ai-prospect-research-guide

I do not know who the speaker is, if you do let me know.

TL;DR

Notion Mail is shutting down on September 22, 2026. If you fell for its saved Views, smart labels, and keyboard-fast inbox, you don't have to give those up. Coherence Mail brings the same speed and structure—then goes further: your mail is encrypted at rest, your smart categories are sorted without an AI reading your messages, you keep your existing Gmail or Outlook address, and your inbox finally sits next to your contacts, deals, and automations instead of in yet another standalone app. Here's how to make the switch a step up instead of a step sideways.

Notion Mail is going away

In early 2025, Notion Mail did something most email clients hadn't in a decade: it made the inbox feel designed. Then, roughly eighteen months later, Notion announced it's sunsetting the product. On September 22, 2026, Notion Mail stops.

That leaves a real question for the people who actually changed their habits around it: where do you go that doesn't feel like a downgrade back to a stock inbox?

We've been building Coherence Mail for exactly this kind of user—someone who wants email to be fast, structured, and connected to the rest of their work. So this isn't a neutral roundup. But we'll be fair about what Notion Mail got right, honest about what it never did, and specific about where Coherence is genuinely better.

What people actually loved about Notion Mail

Give credit where it's due. The reason Notion Mail earned loyalty in a crowded category:

• Views — named, saved slices of your inbox (e.g. "Unread from clients," "Newsletters," "Waiting on reply") that you could jump between instead of re-filtering every time.
• Smart labels / auto-categorization — Google-Inbox-style buckets like Travel, Purchases, and Finance that appeared without manual filing.
• Keyboard-first speed — you could triage a morning's mail without touching the mouse.
• A clean, opinionated design — it didn't look like enterprise software from 2011.
• Calendar in the same surface — mail and schedule side by side.

None of that was revolutionary on its own. Together, it made the inbox feel like a tool you chose rather than one you tolerated. Any replacement worth switching to has to clear that bar—not just match a feature checklist.

What to look for in a replacement

If you're picking a new home for your email, weigh it on more than "does it have folders":

1. Does it keep the workflow you built? Saved views, categories, fast keyboard triage.
2. Who can read your mail? "Free" email products are rarely free of your data.
3. Do you keep your address? You shouldn't have to migrate providers or tell everyone a new email.
4. Does it connect to your actual work? An inbox that knows nothing about your customers is just a nicer place to lose context.
5. Will it still exist in two years? You just learned why that matters.

Hold Coherence up against each of those.

Coherence Mail: the better alternative

1. It keeps what you loved—Views, categories, and speed

Coherence Mail has saved Views: create "Unread from clients," "Newsletters," or "This week's invoices" once, pin it to the sidebar, and jump straight in. It has smart categories—Travel, Purchases, Finance, Newsletters—rendered as color chips right on each row, so your inbox self-sorts the way Notion Mail's labels did. And a global command palette (⌘K) gets you to any inbox, view, or action in a couple of keystrokes.

The muscle memory you built in Notion Mail mostly transfers. That's the point—switching should feel like an upgrade, not re-learning email.

2. It's private by design

Here's the part most inbox apps quietly skip. In Coherence, your mail is encrypted at rest—the contents of your messages are stored as encrypted capsules, not sitting in a database we can casually read.

And our smart categorization is deterministic, not AI-snooping. Sorting a receipt into Purchases or a flight confirmation into Travel happens by reading structured signals (sender patterns, schema.org markup that airlines and stores already embed, unsubscribe headers)—not by feeding your private email into a large language model. You get Google-Inbox-style organization without the trade of "let our AI read everything you receive." When we do offer AI assistance, it's something you opt into, not the default price of a tidy inbox.

For anyone handling client communication, financials, or anything they'd rather not have mined, that difference isn't cosmetic.

3. You keep your Gmail or Outlook address

Coherence Mail connects to your existing Gmail or Microsoft/Outlook account. You're not migrating to a new provider, not forwarding, not emailing 400 contacts a new address. You connect the account you already use and get the better client on top of it. Your email stays yours.

4. Your inbox finally lives where your work does

This is the real gap Notion Mail never closed. It was a better inbox—but still just an inbox. Coherence is an XRM (Anything Relationship Management) platform: email, calendar, contacts, deals, tasks, and custom records in one place.

What that unlocks in day-to-day use:

• Email that files itself against people and deals. A message from a client automatically shows up on that client's record. No logging, no copy-pasting links—the connection just exists.
• Turn an email into work in one step. Create a task, a lead, or a follow-up straight from a message.
• Automations on top of your mail. "When an email arrives from a lead, notify me and start the follow-up sequence"—without gluing three tools together.
• AI agents that can actually do things, because they can see the relationship context around a message, not just its text.

With Notion Mail you triaged your inbox and then went somewhere else to do the work it generated. With Coherence, the inbox and the work are the same surface.

5. It's not being sunset

You adopted Notion Mail, rebuilt your habits, and eighteen months later got a shutdown date. We're not going to pretend any company can promise permanence—but Coherence Mail isn't a standalone bet that gets cut in a strategy shuffle. It's one surface of a platform that businesses run their operations on. The incentive is to keep it running, not wind it down.

Quick comparison

	Notion Mail	Coherence Mail
Status	Shutting down Sept 22, 2026	Actively developed
Saved Views	Yes	Yes
Smart categories	Yes (AI-assisted)	Yes (deterministic, private)
Command palette (⌘K)	—	Yes
Encryption at rest	No	Yes
Works with your Gmail/Outlook	Built on Gmail	Gmail + Outlook
Contacts / CRM built in	No	Yes
Automations & AI agents	No	Yes
Standalone app or full platform	Standalone inbox	Unified workspace

How to switch (it's quick)

1. Create a Coherence account at app.getcoherence.io.
2. Connect your Gmail or Outlook. One OAuth click—no forwarding, no new address.
3. Recreate your custom Views. Rebuild the saved filters that anchored your day—"From key clients," "Awaiting my reply," "This week's invoices." (Common ones like Unread come as defaults, so you only build what's specific to you.)
4. Let categories sort themselves. New mail starts landing in Travel / Purchases / Finance / Newsletters automatically—no rules to set up.
5. Explore the rest when you're ready. Contacts, deals, and automations are already there when your inbox work outgrows the inbox.

You've got until September 22 to move—but the sooner you connect, the sooner your new inbox starts learning your world.

FAQ

Is Coherence Mail free? You can start free. Coherence has a free tier, with paid plans as your team and needs grow—so you can move off Notion Mail without a billing decision on day one.

Do I have to leave Gmail or Outlook? No. Coherence Mail sits on top of the account you already have. You keep your address and your existing mail.

Will my smart categories be as good as Notion's? They cover the same everyday buckets—Travel, Purchases, Finance, Newsletters—and they do it without sending your email through an AI model. If anything, the trade of "organized and private" is the upgrade.

What happens to email I've already received? You connect your existing mailbox and work from it directly—your history comes with your Gmail/Outlook account.

Is this really just for salespeople? No. If you run any relationship-driven work—consulting, an agency, a service business, freelancing—having your inbox connected to the people and projects behind it is the whole point.

The inbox was never the point

Notion Mail proved people will switch email clients for a better experience. Its shutdown proves a standalone inbox is a fragile thing to build your day around.

Coherence Mail keeps the experience you switched for—Views, smart categories, speed—and fixes the two things a lone inbox never could: it protects what's inside your mail, and it connects that mail to the work it creates.

You need a new home for your email before September 22. Make it one you won't have to leave again.

Try Coherence free →