A member of Arena Hall sent me a text at 8am.
“Going to a high-profile event today. I have a list of 26 people who’ll be there. I need a dossier on each one — who they are, what they’re working on, anything interesting. Can you do this?”
Not for next week. Not for tomorrow.
This morning.
By the time the event started, he had a Google Doc with a summary on every person.
Here’s exactly how that was built — and the more powerful version that doesn’t require an 8 am text at all.
The Same-Morning Build
When you need this fast, you’re combining two things: ChatGPT agents for the reasoning layer and Lindy for the data-gathering layer.
Step 1: ChatGPT agents for summarization. Feed the list of names into a ChatGPT agent with clear instructions: who is this person, what are they known for, what’s their current company and role, what’s anything recent worth knowing. For a 26-person list, run it as a batch — you’re not doing one at a time.
Step 2: Lindy for structured research. Build a custom Lindy that takes each name and runs it through Perplexity (for recent news and summaries), Google Search (for anything the person has published or been featured in), and LinkedIn (for current role, background, connections). Lindy aggregates the data from each source.
Step 3: Output to Google Doc. Everything flows into a single Google Doc — one section per person, clean format, ready to read.
For 26 people, this ran in the time it would have taken to manually research two or three of them.
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds
Most people have done some version of the manual process. You’re heading into a dinner or a panel and you spend 20 minutes googling the other people in the room. You scan their LinkedIn. You try to remember something worth bringing up.
Half the time you run out of time and walk in blind. Or you remember one thing about one person and forget the rest by the time you’re sitting down.
The research matters. Knowing who’s in the room — what they’ve worked on, what they care about, who you might know in common — changes how the conversation starts. It’s the difference between walking in prepared and walking in hoping something interesting comes up.
What AI lets you do is compress the research time enough that you can actually do it consistently, not just when you happen to have an hour free the night before.
The Proactive Version: Runs Before You Ask
The same-morning build is reactive. Someone remembered to ask. That’s still dependent on the person thinking to set it up.
The version that works better is automated and proactive.
Every morning at 7am, a briefing lands in your inbox. Here are your meetings today. For each one: a brief on every attendee, their LinkedIn, anything recent about them in the news. Thirty minutes before each call, a second nudge with just the key context for that meeting.
You walk into every room already knowing who’s in it. Without having to think to ask.
The Austin membership club I work with runs something similar. The founder used to spend chunks of his morning digging through emails, documents, and calendar notes just to prepare for what was coming. Now he gets a structured briefing that pulls everything together — meeting context, attendee backgrounds, logistics — before he’s finished his first cup of coffee.
That’s what the shift from reactive to proactive AI actually looks like in practice.
Building This for Yourself
The reactive version (on-demand dossier) requires:
- A list of names and any known context (company, event name helps)
- Access to ChatGPT agents or a similar multi-step AI
- A Lindy workflow connecting to Perplexity, Google, and LinkedIn
- A Google Doc or similar destination for the output
The proactive version (daily briefing) requires:
- Calendar access so the system knows who you’re meeting
- The same research workflow, but triggered by each upcoming calendar event
- A delivery mechanism (email or Slack message works fine)
Both are buildable without writing code. The proactive version takes a few extra hours to set up properly, but once it’s running, it runs before you think to ask.
The Arena Hall member texted me at 8am needing 26 dossiers. He got them. But the better version is the one where he never needs to text at all — because the system already knows he has an event today.
Thanh Pham is the founder of Asian Efficiency and runs the Two Hour Workday program. He helps business owners and executives use AI to show up more prepared without spending more time preparing.
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