A research assistant costs about $60,000 a year once salary and benefits are counted. A CellCog AI Employee runs deep research on any topic, synthesizes sources into cited reports, and summarizes long documents and papers, for a fraction of that.
*A shift is a focused block of work, roughly 2,000 credits (about $20 at standard rates). One shift every working day, 250 days a year, comes to about $5,000 a year; actual cost scales with how much it works.
Five things a research assistant does every day, handled on demand.
Run deep research on a topic and synthesize sources into a report.
Summarize long documents, papers, and reports.
Build literature reviews with proper citations.
Compare options or vendors in a structured analysis.
Gather and organize data from multiple sources.
Copy, paste, and adapt. Each one comes back as a finished artifact.
“Research the electric vehicle charging market. Cover market size, key players, growth trends, and main challenges, with citations I can verify.”
Delivers: a cited research report
“Summarize these three academic papers I am uploading and tell me where they agree and disagree.”
Delivers: a comparative summary
“Build a literature review on remote work productivity from the last five years, with proper citations.”
Delivers: a cited literature review
“Compare four project management tools on price, features, and reviews, and recommend the best for a 10-person team.”
Delivers: a comparison report with a recommendation
“Turn this research report into a 12-slide deck I can present to my team.”
Delivers: a slide deck PDF
Founders hand off the repetitive research assistant work and get back finished deliverables, so they can focus on what only they can do.
Small teams point CellCog AI Employee at the research assistant work no one owns, so output stays consistent and no longer waits on one person.
Agencies produce research assistant deliverables across many clients at once, growing capacity without adding headcount.
Knowing when to lean on a person is the whole point.
Designing and running original experiments or field studies is human work the tool can summarize but not conduct.
A specialist's deep judgment about what a finding really means in context goes beyond synthesizing sources.
A human researcher stakes their name on the work and verifies the hardest claims; the tool supports that, it does not replace it.
Hiring a research assistant is valuable, and expensive. Here is how it compares for the production-heavy parts of the job.
| Human Research Assistant | CellCog AI Employee | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | ~$60,000/yr fully loaded | ≈ $5,000/yr* |
| Availability | Business hours | Works shifts on demand, any hour |
| Ramp-up time | 2 to 4 weeks | Instant |
| Output formats | A few document types | Reports, PDFs, slides, spreadsheets, images, video, audio, dashboards, interactive apps |
| Scalability | One person, one task at a time | Parallel tasks |
| Sick days and turnover | Yes | Never |
| Onboarding | Recruiting and training | Goals, access, and approvals |
| Research turnaround | Days per topic | A cited report in minutes |
| Sources reviewed | As many as time allows | Synthesizes across many at once |
| Output format | Usually a document | Report, deck, or bibliography on demand |
*A shift is a focused block of work, roughly 2,000 credits (about $20 at standard rates). One shift every working day, 250 days a year, comes to about $5,000 a year; actual cost scales with how much it works.
It searches real sources and gives you citations you can verify, which is the point of the design. You should still check the key sources, but it does the gathering and synthesis fast.
Yes, it provides source links so you can verify claims yourself. Verifying the most important ones is good practice, and the tool makes that easy by showing where each fact came from.
It surfaces the disagreement instead of hiding it, showing you where sources conflict so you can judge. That transparency is more useful than a single confident answer.
It handles a wide range of topics and pulls from authoritative sources. For highly specialized fields, treat its report as a strong first pass that a domain expert refines.
A search engine gives you links to read. CellCog AI Employee reads across many sources and returns a synthesized, cited report or deck you can use directly.
A research assistant costs about $60,000 a year once salary and benefits are counted. A CellCog AI Employee works in shifts of roughly 2,000 credits (about $20 each); one shift every working day, 250 days a year, comes to about $5,000.
Click "Hire your AI employee" to sign up and hire one in minutes, or use "Talk to us" and our team will help you set up your AI Research Assistant.
Give it a topic and get back a cited research report you can verify and use right away.