Supplier research
Supplier research turns 'we need a vendor for X in country Y' into a shortlist with capabilities, contact details, and a draft request for proposal. Done manually, it's a multi-day exercise of Google, LinkedIn, supplier directories, and trade-association registers. Done with an agent, it's a 30-minute brief turned into a 15-supplier ranked list within an hour.
The manual reality
Procurement teams in mid-size companies handle dozens of supplier searches per year — each one a small project. Off-the-shelf supplier directories (ThomasNet, Europages, Kompass) cover part of the universe and are paid; LinkedIn covers another part; trade-association registers cover specialised verticals. Aggregating across these manually is the bottleneck, not the decision-making.
The WorkAist approach
The WorkAist supplier research agent takes a structured brief (what you need, in which country, at what volume, with what certifications) and runs a multi-source search: Google search with operators for verticals, LinkedIn for verified company pages, trade-association registers where the agent has access, and public procurement databases. The agent ranks the resulting suppliers by fit, pulls contact details, and drafts the initial outreach message. The procurement officer reviews the shortlist instead of building it.
Implementation in 5 steps
- 1Define the brief: what you need, the country, the volume, the certifications (ISO, sector-specific).
- 2The agent runs a multi-source search across Google, LinkedIn, trade directories, and public registers.
- 3The agent ranks candidates by fit: capability match, certification, size/turnover signals, public reputation.
- 4Review the shortlist and approve the contact list for outreach.
- 5The agent drafts personalised RFP outreach emails — the procurement officer reviews and sends.
Connectors & agents involved
FAQ
What's the accuracy of the rankings?▼
Top-3 accuracy (the supplier you would have chosen in the top 3 of the agent's list) is ~85% in current testing. The agent is best on commodity-adjacent searches (logistics, packaging, office supplies); for highly-specialised verticals (regulated chemistry, defence) the agent's coverage is shallower and the human procurement officer adds more value at the brief stage.
Does this work for regulated procurement (public sector tenders)?▼
Partially. The agent can identify candidate suppliers and check certifications, but the procurement process itself (tender documents, bid evaluation, contract award) remains a human-led process governed by public procurement law. The agent removes the supplier-discovery hours from that process.
Is this just Google search with extra steps?▼
Google search produces a flat list of websites; the agent produces a ranked profile-style shortlist with capability tags, certifications, contact details, and a draft outreach. The structural difference is the synthesis — turning many sources into one usable artefact.
Automate Supplier research this month
Open-source, self-hosted, AGPL-3.0. Your data stays in your infrastructure.
Get started