Claude Cowork for Proprietary Search?

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April 02, 2026

by a searcher from The Ohio State University - Max M. Fisher College of Business in Chicago, IL, USA

Has anybody had any luck replacing tools like Instantly or Apollo with Claude cowork? Curious if anybody has had success with other use cases also. How do you manage usage if running complex tasks?
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Reply by a professional
from Duke University in New York, NY, USA
This topic has come up a few times now. Including a popular recent thread on this: https://searchfunder.com/post/using-claude-for-your-search Also, some of my personal thoughts below. Quick disclaimer / background on my bias: been coding since middle school, competed in math & cs olympiads, majored in cs, was a private equity investor post-grad, currently running my 2nd AI startup. I generally think that Claude Cowork is powerful and can help you do a lot of menial tasks, but proprietary search at the end of the day is a data scraping problem. There are companies that make this their whole business. The reason these businesses exist is because they have access to massive amounts of data either via their own scraping, private data access, etc. This is not to say you can't do some effective scraping yourself, especially if you have a hyper targeted universe of businesses you're going after. Claude cowork is good for well defined, repeatable tasks, so some parts of proprietary search like going through and copy pasting over relevant names of a list into a spreadsheet it'd be very good at. While, other parts, like thinking more deeply of what to use as a source or how to get owner contact information, it could need more guidance in. If you want to venture into using to APIs, I'd recommend taking a look at SERP APIs, web scraping APIs (Apify, firecrawl), etc. However, you still need to know what you're trying to scrape. In terms of cost, I think you should be able to set limits on usage spend, otherwise just set clear guidelines to terminate actions if the AI seems to be spinning its wheels and just burning token & context. Also, it's good to keep in mind that while building tools yourself is easier (and more fun!) than ever, this is also true for others and software companies. In fact, it's BEEN like for almost 2-3 years for software engineers and has only recently become more accessible to non-technical folks. So, it's worth a simple web search to see if someone has already built what you're looking to solve. For example, instead of building your own proprietary sourcing workflows from scratch, there are platforms focused specifically on off-market deal sourcing with AI (we’ve spent most of our time building this at DealDogs). And for software, it's sometimes better to buy than build (pun intended iykyk!) Happy to talk about anything AI or PE related, just shoot me a DM.
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