Mar 19, 2026

Use Carly's Daily Briefing as a Personal Research Assistant

Most people set up Carly’s daily briefing, turn on the schedule summary, and stop there. That’s fine — but it’s using maybe 20% of what the briefing can do.

The custom prompt field turns your daily briefing into a personal research assistant that runs overnight and reports back by morning. News monitoring, competitive intelligence, industry trends, company research — anything Carly can find with a web search, it can include in your briefing automatically.

How the Research Side Works

Carly’s daily briefing runs on a simple loop: every morning, it executes the custom prompts you’ve configured in your dashboard settings, pulls real-time results using web search, and packages everything into a single email.

The custom prompt field isn’t limited to calendar-related questions. You can ask Carly to research anything — and it’ll run fresh every morning. Standing research queries, automatically, indefinitely. A cron job for curiosity.

News and Industry Monitoring

Instead of subscribing to 12 newsletters and skimming half of them, write one prompt:

“Pull the top 5 headlines in AI and SaaS from the last 24 hours.”
“Summarize any major news in the healthcare tech space from yesterday.”
“What happened in crypto markets in the last 24 hours? Skip price-only updates — focus on regulatory, product, and adoption news.”

You get a summary tailored to the topics you care about. Unlike newsletters, you control the scope — narrow it, expand it, iterate until the signal-to-noise ratio is right.

Prompt tip: Add “skip anything older than 48 hours” to keep results fresh and avoid repeated stories.

Competitive Intelligence on Autopilot

A daily briefing makes competitor tracking passive.

“Check for any news about [Competitor A], [Competitor B], and [Competitor C] from the past 24 hours. Include product launches, funding, hiring announcements, and press coverage.”
“Search for any new reviews or comparisons mentioning [your product] vs [competitors].”
“Check if any of our competitors published blog posts, launched features, or made announcements yesterday.”

After a week, you’ll have a better picture of your competitive landscape than most people get from quarterly reports.

Market and Financial Research

You don’t need a Bloomberg Terminal to stay informed.

“Summarize major market moves from yesterday — S&P 500, Nasdaq, and any sector-specific moves in [your sector].”
“Check for SEC filings from [list of companies] in the past 7 days.”
“Pull any analyst upgrades or downgrades for [your watchlist] from the past 48 hours.”
“Summarize any funding rounds announced yesterday in the [fintech/healthtech/climate] space over $10M.”

This replaces the 20 minutes you spend every morning manually checking the same sources. Carly does the scan; you read the results.

People and Company Research

Stay current on specific people or organizations with ongoing monitoring.

“Check for any press mentions, interviews, or social media posts from [specific person] in the past week.”
“Research [company name] — latest news, recent hires, product updates, and any funding activity.”
“Monitor news about [client company] and flag anything I should mention in our next conversation.”

Especially useful for sales, investor relations, and client management. When a meeting comes up, you already know the context.

Regulatory and Policy Monitoring

A standing prompt catches regulatory changes you’d otherwise miss.

“Check for any SEC, FINRA, or FTC announcements from the past 24 hours that affect [your industry].”
“Summarize any new legislation or policy proposals related to [data privacy / AI regulation / financial compliance] from the past week.”
“Flag any changes to [GDPR / HIPAA / SOX] enforcement or guidance from the past 48 hours.”

A well-written prompt gets you 80% of the value in zero active time.

Prompt Engineering for Better Briefings

The difference between a useful briefing and a noisy one comes down to prompt precision.

Be specific about scope: “Top 5 AI headlines” works better than “AI news.” “News about [these 3 companies]” works better than “news about my industry.”

Set time windows: “From the past 24 hours” or “from this week” keeps results fresh and avoids Carly resurfacing the same stories.

Tell Carly what to skip: “Skip opinion pieces” or “focus on product and business news, not thought leadership” narrows the signal.

Combine calendar + research: “Pull news about companies I’m meeting with this week AND the top 3 headlines in SaaS.” Calendar-aware research and standalone research in the same briefing.

Use multiple prompts: You’re not limited to one. Set up a news prompt, a competitor prompt, and a market prompt separately. Each one runs independently.

Example Briefing: Research-Focused

A research-heavy briefing for a startup founder:

From: carly@usecarly.com Subject: Your Wednesday Briefing — March 18

Industry News (AI/SaaS, last 24 hours):

OpenAI announced a new enterprise API tier with lower latency guarantees

Notion acquired a small AI startup focused on document understanding

Gartner published a new Magic Quadrant for AI development platforms — [link]

Competitor Watch:

[Competitor A] published a case study with a Fortune 500 client

[Competitor B] posted 3 new job listings for enterprise sales reps (likely expanding upmarket)

No news on [Competitor C]

Funding & Deals:

Two Series B rounds in your space: DataLayer ($35M, Sequoia) and Pipestream ($22M, a16z)

Your Calendar:

4 meetings today. New contact at 11 AM: VP Product at Relay, joined 6 months ago from Stripe.

Getting Started

Log into your Carly dashboard
Go to Dashboard → Daily Briefing
Add custom prompts for the research you want automated
Save — your first briefing arrives tomorrow morning

Start with one or two prompts. After a few days, you’ll see what’s useful and what needs tuning.

Need to go deeper? You can build your own custom AI agent with access to Google Drive, your CRM, and other integrations — turning Carly into a research tool that pulls from your own data, not just the web.

Set up your daily briefing →