Exploring Epic One's New Research Mood: Transforming Data Efficiency

It's Thursday afternoon and a customer wants to know if you can source a part from someone other than your usual vendor. So you open a tab for the distributor, another for the manufacturer's spec page, a third for the catalog PDF, and a fourth for last year's email thread. Forty minutes later you've got a half-built list in a notepad and a nagging doubt about whether the numbers are current. Sound familiar? That's the kind of afternoon Epic One's new Research mood is meant to shorten.

What the Research mood is

Epic One has six moods, and you switch between them depending on what you're working on. Research is the newest. In the app it's labeled "Checked lists from the sites you choose," and that label is the whole idea. You decide which sites it should look at. It comes back with a list, and the list has been checked. You're not asking an AI to riff from memory and hoping for the best. You're pointing it at sources you already trust and asking for the answer in a form you can use.

How a Research project works, step by step

Research is a licensed add-on mood. It builds a checked list about anything from the sites you choose: who to market to, suppliers, competitors, grants, properties. Nothing is built in. You pick the sites, what to look for, and the columns. Every value in the finished list shows the page it came from.

Step 1, add your Research Sources. Under Settings > Connections > Research Sources you add the sites you want Epic One to use. Each one is a directory, a registry, company data, or something else. For each, you say in your own words what it's good for, like "state registry, good for year founded and legal name." If a site is members-only, you enter or pick a saved login, and Epic One signs in as you. It only sees what your login can see. Press Test and you'll see real results from that site before you rely on it.

Step 2, describe the project. You write what you want in plain words. For example: "a list of commercial cleaning companies in Austin with phone, address and year founded." You choose the columns, where to gather from, and which source checks which column. Epic One shows you the setup and only saves it when you say yes.

Step 3, gather. Epic One searches your sources and reads pages in the background while a progress bar tracks it. You can keep working, and you can stop a run and resume it later.

Step 4, verify. Each row is checked against the sources you chose for each column. Blanks get filled and values get confirmed. Where two sources disagree, both values are kept and flagged, and nothing is overwritten. Rows that no source can find are marked "not found," with the sites that were tried, so you know the gap is real and not a skipped step.

Step 5, use the list. Ask in plain words, like "how many have no phone?" or "show the ones founded before 2000." You can also filter on the Research page. Say "email me the list" and you get an Excel file. Its second sheet shows where every value came from.

Four lists a shop might build

Prospect lists. You make bearings for food-processing lines and want every packaging plant within two hours of your shop. Describe it, set columns for company, address, phone, and year founded, and point it at a business directory plus your state registry. The registry checks the founded year, the directory checks the phone. Then ask for the ones founded before 2000, or how many have no phone, and email the sales team the Excel file.

Supplier vetting. A customer wants a second source for a plated part. Build a list of platers with the certifications you need as columns, and check each against the sites that publish them. A row where the plater's site and a registry disagree gets both values and a flag, so the buyer calls instead of assuming. A row nobody can confirm says "not found" and lists the sites tried.

Competitor lists. Gather the shops that quote the same work you do in your region, with location, size, and the services they advertise. Because every value carries its source page, you can answer "where did that come from?" in the next meeting without digging.

Grants. Point Research at the grant listings you trust and build a list with program name, deadline, and eligibility as columns. Filter on the Research page to see what's still open, and have the list emailed to whoever owns the application.

Where it earns its keep in a shop

Think about the lookups that live outside your ERP. Comparing what two suppliers publish for the same item. Pulling a list of options from a manufacturer's site before you quote. Gathering what a vendor's catalog says so a buyer can check it against a PO. These jobs aren't hard. They're slow, because the information is scattered and someone has to read it all and type it up. A checked list shortens the reading and the retyping, and it leaves the judgment where it belongs, with the person who knows the shop. Pair it with what Epic One already knows from your ERP and CRM, and the research stops being a separate chore.

Choosing the sites is the point

The "sites you choose" part matters more than it sounds. Your people already know which supplier pages are right and which forum threads are guesswork. Research lets them keep that instinct and skip the tab juggling. You pick the sources, so you know where a number came from when a customer asks.

How it fits with Epic One security

A new mood doesn't change the ground rules, and we'd rather you hear them from us than assume. Each company gets a dedicated server, and your users, conversations, documents, and ERP records live there and nowhere else. Access follows each person's own ERP login, so nobody sees more through Epic One than they could see directly. Any change to an ERP record still shows the exact change and waits for a person to approve it, and every action lands in the audit log. Research follows the same rules. The logins you give it are kept under Saved Credentials and used only as you, so it sees only what your own login can see. A project's setup is saved only after you approve it, and every value in a list carries the page it came from. Epic One's language processing runs on Anthropic's commercial Claude API, whose terms prohibit training on customer data. Our security page lays all of this out, written for the person who has to sign off. Read it before you decide anything, and forward it to your IT lead.

Here's your takeaway. Next time you catch yourself with five tabs open for one answer, write down which sites you actually trusted for it. That short list is exactly what Research wants from you. When you're ready to try it, get Epic One set up and tell us which ERP you run, or read the security page first if your IT lead wants answers before anything connects.