As of 13 August 2026, AI can find new business prospects.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Do it yourself

   Second choice

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a spreadsheet and create columns for company, website, location, fit evidence, likely problem, buying signal, contact route, source URL, verification status and notes.
   2. Write down your offer, ideal customer profile, UK geography, exclusions and the evidence that would count as a useful buying signal.
   3. Paste those details into the prompt and ask the chatbot to research a small initial batch of prospects using current public sources.
   4. Copy each proposed company into the spreadsheet with the source URL and mark every claim as verified, inferred or unchecked.
   5. Open the company website and any cited public source for each shortlisted prospect, then confirm that the business is active, in scope and still shows the relevant need.
   6. Remove duplicates, existing customers, poor-fit companies and entries with invented or uncheckable contact details.
   7. Check the intended contact route and proposed use of the data against your organisation's UK GDPR and PECR process before sending any outreach.

   Prompt

   Find new B2B business prospects for this offer: [describe the product or service]. Target businesses in [UK location or market]. The ideal prospect has these characteristics: [industry, size, customer type, technology, problem or buying signal]. Exclude: [industries, sizes, locations or existing customers to exclude].
   
   Use current public sources where available. Return a table with: company name, website, location, evidence that it matches the criteria, likely business problem, possible reason to contact now, publicly listed general business contact route, source URL for every factual claim, and an uncertainty note. Do not invent companies, people, job titles, email addresses, phone numbers, budgets, buying intent or personal data. Do not scrape or infer private contact details. Separate verified facts from your own inferences, and mark any item that needs manual checking.
   
   Prioritise fit over list size. Do not write outreach messages yet. At the end, give me a short verification checklist covering the company, current relevance, contact route and whether the proposed outreach would comply with UK GDPR and PECR. If the available information is not current or sufficient, say so instead of filling the gap.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.