🎧 PODCAST: Trading the Fiat For a Ferrari: AI Based Deep Research

I HIGHLY rECOMMEND THAT YOU TAKE THE TIME TO LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST, IT DOES AN EXCELLENT JOB OF EXPLAINING JUST HOW ai dEEP rESEARCH WORKS AND HOW RESEARCHERS AND iNVESTIGATORS ALIKE CAN GET THE BEST FROM IT....

I Highly rECOMMEND THAT YOU TAKE THE TIME TO LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST, IT DOES AN EXCELLENT JOB OF EXPLAINING JUST HOW 'ai' based dEEP rESEARCH WORKS AND HOW RESEARCHERS AND iNVESTIGATORS ALIKE CAN GET THE BEST FROM IT....

Trading the Fiat For a Ferrari: AI Based Deep Research

Published: 2026-02-20 by Gordon Cramer

If you are entertaining the idea that maybe you could make use of AI Deep Research tools as opposed to more traditional research methods, I have to tell you that this is going to be like trading in your Fiat 500 for a Ferrari F80.

The sheer analytical power that becomes instantly available to you will shock and mesmerise you. However, if you do not know how to handle that kind of speed and manoeuvrability, you are going to crash.

Sadly, here are ill-informed people, armchair gurus, online who will complain about "AI generating rubbish." Those people are simply lacking in knowledge and, like any untrained driver, they don't know how to steer the machine nor how to get the best from it. Over the next few weeks, I am going to share my experience of using Deep Research, demonstrating how it has not only saved countless hours but simultaneously increased accuracy and opened up new avenues of investigation I might otherwise have missed. Best of all the tutorials are free and, you are the driver of AI, not the other way round, you are the one in control.

Why We Are Doing This

For those of us who spend years digging into historical archives, the sheer volume of data is our greatest enemy. Imagine you are investigating a complex, decades-old cold case—like the Somerton Man. You are dealing with thousands of pages of primary sources: handwritten police reports, conflicting witness statements, autopsy notes, and perhaps even clandestine intelligence tradecraft.

Traditionally, cross-referencing a timeline across that mountain of paperwork takes months. A single missed detail in a blurry file can cost you a breakthrough. AI does not get tired, and it does not lose its place. We are not using AI to write stories or invent theories; we are using it to build a secure, digital incident room where it acts as a high-speed indexer, pointing us precisely to the evidence we need to test.

How This Course Will Work

Because we are dealing with advanced tools, I am not going to throw a 40-minute, fast-paced video at you and expect you to keep up.

Instead, these tutorials will be delivered as Interactive Slide Presentations.

You Control the Pace: A navigation menu on the side of the presentation will allow you to move forward, jump back to clarify a point, or pause entirely so you can open Gemini in another window and practice the steps yourself.

Step-by-Step Visuals: We will walk through the actual screens, highlighting exactly which buttons to click and what parameters to set.

Self-Testing: Along the way, we will include a few interactive questions so you can test your understanding before moving on to the next concept.

The Roadmap: What to Expect

Over the next few weeks, we will break this process down into three manageable tutorials:

Tutorial 1: The Setup and The Research Plan. We will start at the very beginning—the Gemini home screen. You will learn how to set the parameters of your investigation, how to upload your own files, and how to command the AI to build a strict, focused research plan.

Tutorial 2: The Deep Dive and Verbatim Processing. We will cover how the AI processes data and the golden rule of archival uploads: forcing the machine to transcribe documents exactly as they appear, without summarizing or guessing.

Tutorial 3: Interrogation and Verification. AI is a pointer, not a producer. In the final module, you will learn how to interrogate the AI's final report and rigorously test every citation it provides against the original evidence.

The keys are in the ignition. Next week, we will sit in the driver's seat and look at the dashboard.