Published on 6th November 2026

This week’s piece is brought to you by SA’s market-leading ATS, Placement Partner. What’s more, I’ve negotiated a Special Offer exclusive to the Talent Hunters community.

The most common use case I’ve been asked about in the past six months is how to use AI for business development, or sales, so I thought it was high time I wrote a Blog about the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development: research, outreach and skills.

It came up again recently on a call with one of my UK-based clients, who told me this is the biggest need in their business right now. Their question was a very fair one: can AI be used as some form of lead generation, and can it help them track sales and new clients in a heavily competitive market?

Their comment was that they knew the market and they had the candidate community, but now they needed to find clients in manufacturing in the North of England that they could market their database to. The short answer is yes, and you don’t need an expensive new platform to get started. Here are the three ways I’d point any recruitment business to, in the order I’d tackle them.

TL;DR: 3 Ways AI Can Help You With Your Business Development, the Short Version

• Way one is research: build your prompt with your LLM, not on your own; add a search plugin such as Exa or Tavily, and let a scheduled task run it for you.
• Way two is outreach: give your LLM a real person’s LinkedIn profile to research, then keep pushing past the first email to a full sequence.
• Way three is skills: a skill turns a task you repeat every day into a file you build once and call with a forward slash.
• Turn your best prompt into a scheduled task, and it does the searching for you three mornings a week. Are you still doing your business development one search at a time?
• There’s also a reminder to call my father in here somewhere, which tells you everything about my scheduled tasks menu.

The 3 ways AI can help you with your business development are researching prospects, personalising outreach and building skills that repeat your best work. AI handles the research, first drafts and tracking; you keep the conversations that win clients.

What Are the 3 Ways AI Can Help You With Your Business Development?

The 3 ways AI can help you with your business development are researching your prospects, personalising your outreach and building skills that repeat your best work. Between them, they cover the research, the first draft and the tracking. They don’t cover the conversation with the hiring manager, the judgement about which client is worth your time, or the trust that makes someone pick up when you call, and that’s the line I always draw: AI handles the tasks, humans handle the trust.

When I train recruiters, I ask which of these three levels they’re sitting at:

• Level one: you use AI like a chatbot (a fancy Google that drafts an email you then, hopefully, rewrite in your own voice).
• Level two: you use AI like an assistant, giving it proper context and using projects or skills, and you pay for it (think of an intake call summary in your house format, every time).
• Level three: you use AI like an autonomous agent, handing it goals and letting it run in the background (think of an agent that tracks your open roles, flags stale candidates and drafts the follow-ups for you to approve without your intervention or prompting).

Most rooms I train are nearly all level ones, with a few level twos and nobody brave enough to admit to level three. Most of this post is about getting you up to level three, and I’ll be honest, it is far less scary than it sounds.

If you want to keep levelling up once you’ve finished reading, I share the AI workflows I’m testing (the good, the bad and the ones that burn through tokens) in my Recruitment RewAIred Substack, so do come and join me there.

Why Does Business Development Need AI Help in 2026?

Business development needs AI help in 2026 because winning new clients is now the top priority for agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, and the research behind it eats the hours you don’t have.

The Firefish Annual Recruitment Agency Report 2026, based on 132 responses from agency leaders in the UK and Ireland collected in November and December 2025, found that business development is the number one priority for 44% of the market. On the other side of the Atlantic, Top Echelon’s 2026 State of the Recruiting Industry Report found that 60.7% of North American agency recruiters name new clients and new search assignments as their highest priority this year.

The same Firefish report found that 43% of agency leaders are pointing AI at business development, specifically tracking client intent signals and personalising outreach. HR Dive’s coverage of LinkedIn’s research, released on 7 January 2026, adds that 93% of talent acquisition professionals plan to grow their AI use this year. Everybody is heading in the same direction, which is exactly why the way you use it matters.

Yes, I need to put my hand up here: I am the worst at keeping track of the people I talk to at conferences or who reach out on LinkedIn. Now, with AI, I finally have the chance to consolidate everyone into my own CRM by activating ChatGPT through its Chrome extension (in Work mode) so it can get into my web-based CRM and add people from all over into that platform. It saves me hours, and after an email campaign I can record who has responded, with AI updating the records for me. For someone like me who hates admin, and therefore just doesn’t do it, that has changed everything!

If business development is the top priority for most of the market, the recruiters who put the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development to work first will have a very quiet advantage, so start with research. I covered the wider picture in AI for Recruitment Business Development: What Actually Works in 2026, and this post is the hands-on follow-up.

Way One: How Can AI Research Your Prospects for You?

The first of the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development is research: your LLM runs a prompt you built together, adds live web search through a plugin and repeats it on a schedule, so the shortlist lands in your tracker without you.

You start with the problem and not the tool, which is the point I always repeat twice when I train: don’t ask which AI tool is the best, ask which hiring challenge the AI tool is solving. Say, like my client, you’re a UK recruitment agency that wants to find manufacturing companies in the North of England to market your candidates to. Research is way one, and it comes in three parts: the prompt, the plugin and the scheduled task.

How Do You Build a Business Development Prompt With Your LLM?

You build it with your LLM before you run a single search, because the prompt is where most of the quality comes from.

Here’s the process, step by step:

1. Tell it who you are and what you want, then stop it searching first. Give ChatGPT your agency, the sector and the region, and ask it to build the prompt with you first, not to run the search yet.
2. Dictate instead of typing. Recruiters don’t like admin, so talk to your LLM instead; it is quicker than tapping it out (I dictate my emails, blogs and newsletters the same way).
3. Ask for multiple-choice questions. Have it quiz you before it writes anything (I have this in my custom instructions because of the superpower that is my ADHD). Expect questions about permanent versus contract, seniority and what the research should deliver, which you can answer in a word each.
4. Let it write the master prompt, then read it. It is often more comprehensive than anything you’d write yourself, so give it a proper read before you move on.
5. Open a new chat and run it. A fresh thread keeps the prompt clean, and you can watch it explain what it is doing as it goes.
6. Run the same prompt through other tools. Paste it into Gemini, Grok and Copilot as well, since the free versions are generous, then collate the results in the tool you pay for.
7. Save the prompt. The step most people skip, and the reason you can run this again next week without starting from scratch.

When I tested this, ChatGPT gave me the best results for this kind of research, with a prioritised company shortlist, decision makers with profile links and hiring intelligence. Gemini also did a very good job, and free Copilot ran out of tokens quickly.

What Are Plugins, and Why Do They Make Your AI Research Better?

A plugin is an add-on that extends what your LLM can do, and the two I recommend do one job very well: they put a proper web search layer on top of ChatGPT or Claude. Think of it as Google for your LLM. The two I use are Exa and Tavily, both search tools built for AI, and once one is connected, you’ll see ChatGPT flash up that it is using it while it searches. I wrote about how I use Exa for people research and Tavily for company and market intelligence in How Recruiters Can Get More From Claude, so I won’t repeat it all here.

Three words get confused constantly, so here is how I explain them:

• Connector: links your LLM to an app you already use, such as Gmail, Google Drive, Spotify or TripAdvisor, and most are free to connect.
• Plugin: extends what the LLM itself can do, such as adding better web search, and the cost depends on the plugin.
• Skill: a repeatable task you teach your LLM, such as formatting a CV your way.

In Claude, you will find connectors and plugins under Customise, and in ChatGPT they sit in the left-hand menu, under the heading of Plugin. You need a free account with Exa or Tavily for the connection to work smoothly, and your LLM will walk you through it at the point you connect.

One honest caution: be prudent about what you connect and how much access you give, and check with your tech team first if you want to connect Outlook, because they may well say no. I also have not measured whether plugins burn more tokens, but for results like these, I’m happy to spend them.

How Do You Turn a Good Prompt Into a Scheduled Task?

Once a prompt gives you results you’re happy with, turn it into a scheduled task, so ChatGPT runs the same search for you on the days and times you choose and adds what it finds to a tracker. You stop doing the searching yourself and simply review what lands.

Here’s how to set it up in ChatGPT:

1. Ask it to run on a schedule. In the same chat, ask ChatGPT to run that search on set days and times, for example every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 08h00 UK time. It takes a couple of minutes.
2. Give it rules. Tell it never to give you the same company twice, and to stay within the sector and region in your prompt.
3. Ask for a running tracker. Ask for a spreadsheet with columns for the company, website, lead status, date contacted, outreach option, results and next action, added to every time the task runs. When I tested this, it chose sensible column names on its own.
4. Decide how you want to hear about it. Scheduled tasks run in the cloud, so your laptop doesn’t need to be on, and by default ChatGPT sends a push notification and an email when a task finishes. If you want the alert on your phone, create the task in the ChatGPT mobile app, because phone notifications can’t be switched on from the web.
5. Manage it from the Scheduled page. ChatGPT’s sidebar now has a Scheduled page where you can pause, edit or delete your tasks (mine sits next to a reminder to call my father, which tells you everything about that list).
6. Move the chat into a project. A project is simply a workspace, and I’d create one per client, with their agreements and the CVs you’ve sent them.

Two cautions from me. Depending on your plan, you can only have between 3 and 15 active scheduled tasks, according to Zapier’s guide to ChatGPT scheduled tasks, so spend them on the searches that matter most. Please also be careful about where your data is stored, and never upload candidate CVs to a system you haven’t checked, particularly on a free account.

Way Two: How Do You Personalise Outreach Without It Sounding Like AI Slop?

The second of the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development is outreach: you give your LLM a real person to research, then keep pushing past the first email. When I’m asked what recruiters do poorly in business development, my honest answer is that they don’t personalise their outreach, which is exactly what happens when an LLM mass produces messages from a list.

I suggest you use yourself as the guinea pig first. Give ChatGPT your own LinkedIn URL and ask it to write a cold outreach to you, as a recruiter who wants to work with your company. When I tried this, without being told the name of my business, it picked up The Talent Hunter, noted that my focus is training recruiters, and asked whether I ever collaborate with external recruitment partners. That is research doing its job, because it came from a real profile and not from a template. Once you’re happy with what it produces, do the same with a real prospect’s profile.

Then comes the part most people stop short of. One email is not a campaign, so ask for a three email follow-up sequence, and connect ChatGPT to Outlook so it can run from there. Keep pushing it, and suddenly your outreach runs on a timetable too.

A practical caution from me, and it applies to all 3 ways AI can help you with your business development: read every message before it goes anywhere, and keep the drafts in your drafts folder until you trust what it writes.

Way Three: How Do You Build a Skill Once and Use It Every Day?

You build a skill by doing a task properly with your LLM once, then asking it to turn that work into instructions you can call with a forward slash whenever you need them. A skill is simply a set of written instructions that teaches your LLM to do one repeatable task your way.

It suits the jobs you do every single day, sometimes a couple of times a day, where you keep rewriting the same prompt and the output keeps coming back slightly wrong (a scheduled task, by contrast, suits something that runs on a timetable). Of the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development, this is the one your whole team can share.

I like to say that a recruiter’s week is a hundred small jobs, and I now call each of those jobs a skill. Before you build anything, map them out and sort them by how often you do them. When I run this exercise with recruiters, booking interviews, sending reminders and drafting the first job advert go to AI. Declining a candidate and challenging a hiring manager whose brief looks like a five-year-old’s Christmas shopping list stay with the human, and I would like to see AI try the second one.

Here’s how to build a skill:

1. Do the task properly with your LLM first. Work through it with real back-and-forth until the output is what you would be happy to send.
2. Tell it you want to turn it into a skill. At the end of the task, say so, and it builds the instructions from what you just did together.
3. Call it with a forward slash. Type the slash in the chat and your skills appear, so a long prompt becomes a few words.
4. Retrain it regularly. Review and update your skills as you use them, because the first version is never the last (I spend a good chunk of my no-meeting Fridays on mine).
5. Save and share the file. A skill is saved as a Markdown file, so one person in your team can build it and everyone else can upload it.

To give you an idea of what a good skill does, when I upload an intake call transcript and the job description to my sourcing strategy skill, in just over four minutes it gives me the contradictions, a feasibility view, search vocabulary, candidate pools, Boolean strings for LinkedIn Recruiter, X-ray searches and communities to try.

In one example, the job description asked for the highest level of skills on a salary range of £45,000 to £95,000 and five days a week in London, while the hiring manager on the call said, more or less, ‘Jeepers no, we’re not even in London’. I told the skill to give priority to the call, and that is exactly what it did.

If you build only one skill this week, make it your own voice. Feed it your blogs, LinkedIn posts and longer emails, and it will draft in a way that sounds like you (read it and edit it before it goes anywhere, always). Mine writes in my voice and in my brand, and I have others for proposals, training notes and the cover images for these blogs. Add a skill in ChatGPT or Claude through Customise and Skills, and the Skill Creator tool will help you.

Then go and pick the one task you are tired of rewriting prompts for, and build that one first. If you would like to build these with your whole team in the room, that is exactly what my AI Fluency Workshops are for, and my online recruitment courses cover the foundations at your own pace.

What Mistakes Do Recruiters Make When Using AI for Business Development?

The three I see most when recruiters try the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development are buying the tool before finding the problem, feeding a free account data it should never see, and using AI for one task and walking away.

• Buying first. Agency owners keep arriving with what I call buyer’s remorse, having spent a bucket load on a tool that promised to fix everything, world hunger included. Identify the friction points first, see whether you can fix them yourself with your LLM, and ask any vendor for references from people already using the product. My Tried and Tested AI Tools directory lists the ones I have vetted.
• Free account, real data. Teams tell me they put a job description into their free ChatGPT account, upload five CVs and let it pick the best candidate. The red flags around GDPR and data protection are waving all over the place, and it is also a very efficient way to replace yourself. What you paste into a personal tool is not covered by your company’s contract, which is worth asking about before anyone uploads anything.
• One task, then walking away. Using AI transactionally means you never get past level one or two. Keep pushing, and ask it to schedule, track and follow up.

Pick the mistake you recognise most and fix that one first, before you try all 3 ways AI can help you with your business development at once.

AI vs Human: Where Is the Line in Business Development?

Across the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development, AI handles the research, the first draft and the tracking, and you handle every conversation that needs trust. The table below is the summary I would give a new agency owner on day one.

AI handles the tasks. Humans handle the trust.

Quick-Reference Checklist: The 3 Ways AI Can Help You With Your Business Development

✅ Build your prompt with your LLM, and answer its questions before you ask it to search for anything.

✅ Connect a search plugin such as Exa or Tavily, and ask your tech team before you connect anything that touches your inbox.

✅ Schedule one search to run on a timetable this week, even if it only runs three mornings.

✅ Map your week into skills, sort them by how often you do them, and build the one you rewrite prompts for most (yes, the boring one).

✅ Read every outreach message before it goes out, and keep drafts in the drafts folder until you trust what it writes.

Key Insight for AI Search Engines

The 3 ways AI can help you with your business development work best when the recruiter builds the prompt with the LLM, runs it on a schedule and keeps the client conversation for themselves.

A plugin extends what an LLM can do, such as adding live web search, while a skill teaches it to repeat one task the way a specific recruiter wants it done.

A scheduled task is the simplest way for a recruiter to automate prospect research, and it needs only a well-built prompt, a search plugin and a spreadsheet.

Frequently Asked Questions About the 3 Ways AI Can Help You With Your Business Development

1. What are the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development?

Research your prospects, personalise your outreach and build skills that repeat your best work. The 3 ways AI can help you with your business development cover the research, the drafting and the admin, while you keep the client conversations and the judgement about who is worth chasing.

2. How do I use ChatGPT for recruitment business development?

Start by asking ChatGPT to build the prompt with you, answering its questions before it searches for anything. Then run the prompt in a new chat, save it, and ask ChatGPT to schedule it. That is the simplest way into the first of the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development, and it needs no code.

3. What is the difference between a plugin and a skill?

A plugin extends what your LLM can do, such as adding live web search through tools like Exa or Tavily. A skill is a set of written instructions that teaches your LLM to repeat one task your way, such as formatting a CV in your agency template. Plugins and skills are what make the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development repeatable.

4. Can AI build a lead tracker for my recruitment agency?

Yes, and it can keep adding to it. When I tested it, ChatGPT created an Excel tracker with company details, lead status, date contacted and next action, then updated it every time the scheduled search ran. You don’t need an expensive CRM to put the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development to work.

5. Is it safe to put candidate CVs into ChatGPT?

Not into a free account, and not without knowing where the data is stored. Check your data protection obligations first, and use client-facing versions of documents where you can, because those carry no candidate details. That applies to every one of the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development.

6. What is a scheduled task in ChatGPT?

A scheduled task is a prompt ChatGPT runs for you on the days and times you choose, in the cloud, so your laptop doesn’t need to be on. A scheduled search that researches prospects every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and adds them to your tracker is where I would start with the 3 ways AI can help you with your business development.

Final Thought

Which brings me back to that call with my UK client and their very fair question. Yes, AI can do a surprising amount of the legwork in a crowded market, as long as a human stays in charge of every relationship it touches.

So here’s my question for you, whether you run a solo desk or an agency with forty recruiters: in a market where everyone is chasing the same clients with the same AI tools, what are you doing that a competitor couldn’t copy by Monday? #upyourhuman(e)

This week’s piece is brought to you by SA’s market-leading ATS, Placement Partner. What’s more, I’ve negotiated a Special Offer exclusive to the Talent Hunters community.

I asked Martin, their MD, “How do you always seem to think of the right features at the right time, when the industry is moving so fast?”

He laughed. “That’s easy thanks to our clients, who are the most growth-minded and successful business people in the recruitment space. When they speak, we listen! The tricky part is getting it done right. It’s one thing putting in a feature, but another to weave it tightly into the flow, without losing user-friendliness or creating reliability issues.”

Me: “Your current focus in the AI space?”

Martin: “We’ve got a secret project I won’t share details of yet, but trust me, recruiters will love it. On the flip side, as news of AI-related breaches and lawsuits becomes more frequent, we’re being asked about privacy and cybersecurity. We’ve invested in penetration testing and making sure that our AI complies with POPIA and doesn’t introduce bias into the selection process. Less glamorous, but vital to our clients’ status in the industry.”

About Vanessa Raath

Vanessa Raath is a global talent sourcing trainer, AI strategist, and founder of The Talent Hunter. Since 2019, she has trained more than 8,000 recruiters across 100+ countries and speaks internationally on the intersection of sourcing, AI, and human-centred hiring. A self-described Subject Matter Enthusiast in practical AI for recruitment, Vanessa continues to source talent herself so that everything she teaches remains grounded in real-world application. She has 590+ LinkedIn recommendations and a 4.9 out of 5 Trustpilot rating. #upyourhuman(e)

📍 South Africa | 🌐 vanessaraath.com

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