Research with Company Documents in Deep Research

Combine ChatGPT's Deep Research agent with your internal documents-via SharePoint, OneDrive, or Dropbox-to conduct comprehensive analysis that merges public web information with proprietary company knowledge. This hybrid approach accelerates market research, competitive analysis, and due diligence by accessing both external sources and internal reports in a single research session.

ChatGPT's Deep Research feature, launched in early 2025 and continuously upgraded through 2026, is an agentic AI system that conducts multi-step research on complex questions. What makes it powerful for professional teams is the March 2026 integration with SharePoint, OneDrive, and Dropbox-meaning Deep Research can now blend web sources with your internal document repository, creating research reports that reference both public information and company-specific data without manual copy-pasting.

To use this in practice: Start a Deep Research task in ChatGPT (click the "+" in the message composer and select "Deep Research"). Before the research begins, you'll see a proposed research plan that you can edit and refine. In this plan, you can add trusted sources-specific websites, internal SharePoint folders, Dropbox directories, or even connected apps like Slack. Tell Deep Research to prioritize your company's internal market analysis over general web results, for example. The agent then conducts 5-30 minutes of autonomous research, synthesizing findings from both public web pages and your internal documents, and delivers a fully cited report.

A concrete example: A business development team at a B2B software company needs competitive analysis for an upcoming partnership pitch. They use Deep Research with access to: their internal CRM (containing historical deal analysis and customer feedback), their OneDrive folder (containing previous market research and whitepapers), and the open web (for current competitor announcements and industry news). They prompt: "Analyze the state of compliance software for healthcare SaaS providers in 2026, covering market size, key players, feature gaps, and opportunities. Prioritize our internal research and customer feedback over generic web sources." Deep Research synthesizes this into a structured report with citations pointing to both internal documents and external sources-something that would normally require 2-3 days of manual research work.

For professionals, this technique works especially well for market research, due diligence reports, literature reviews, policy briefs, and competitive analysis-anywhere you need to combine proprietary company knowledge with current external information. The key is connecting the right sources upfront so Deep Research can follow your research guidelines automatically.