Deep Research
Plan a web research task, review its progress, and reuse a report with citations.
Deep Research turns a question into a multi-step web investigation and a cited report. Use it when you need to compare sources or investigate several aspects of a topic, rather than get a short chat answer.
Before you begin
Use a signed-in Portal session in the intended tenant, with the required research permissions. The tenant needs working research-model and web-search configuration. Ask the tenant administrator to check Deep Research settings if a run cannot start.
Start research
- Open a conversation in Chat & Work and enable Deep Research in the composer.
- Write your question, including the scope, date range, audience, and comparisons you need. For example: “Compare open-source vector databases for a self-hosted document search service. Focus on filtering, hybrid search, and backup operations.”
- Send the question. The research view shows the current stage and activity.
- If clarification questions appear, answer the relevant ones and select Submit answers. You can leave answers blank. When the clarification deadline expires, research continues with the information already supplied.
Deep Research searches the web through the tenant's configured search provider. It does not search your private Files library, run Skills, or use live Voicebot. Use ordinary chat with retrieval for questions about uploaded documents.
Review the plan
Before searching, Deep Research presents proposed search queries and their rationale. Select Edit plan to change queries, add a search, or remove one. Keep at least one query, then select Approve plan.
The countdown is an automatic-continuation deadline, not an indefinite approval pause. If it expires, the original plan runs. Submit your changes before the countdown ends, or cancel the run if it should not continue.
Follow progress
The research view separates clarification, planning, searching, synthesis, and the report. The activity trace shows searches, pages read, and additional research rounds. A tenant administrator controls the limits and timeouts applied when a run starts.
You can close or minimize the research view and return through conversation history. Closing the view does not cancel the job. Select Cancel to stop an active run; a cancelled or failed run does not become a completed report.
Read and export the report
The completed report includes a summary, sections, citations, and any reported limitations or coverage gaps. Open the cited sources to check claims important to your decision. An unverified source label means the citation URL was not found in the collected reference set; a citation or credibility indicator is not independent proof of correctness.
Use Export as Markdown or Export as Text to save the report. Keep its citations with the exported content.
Follow up or remove a run
Send a follow-up question in the same research conversation to start another run. It receives the previous completed report's summary and a bounded selection of citations, not every page or intermediate step from the earlier investigation. Use the run selector to revisit earlier runs.
Cancel stops work. Delete removes the research job and its report from your available history. Export anything you need before deleting; the Portal does not provide a restore action. Deleting a research job does not retract copies you have already exported.
Access
Research jobs belong to the signed-in user within the active tenant. Creating, listing, reading, answering clarification, approving a plan, cancelling, and deleting use separate research.job.* permissions. A permission to read research does not expose another user's jobs.