As of 13 August 2026, AI can find people to network with in a new industry.

What to actually do

1. Do it yourself

   The route this page recommends

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

   How to actually do it

   1. Write down your target industry, UK location, career background, learning goal and the kind of people you want to meet.
   2. Open a chatbot or Merlin AI and paste the prompt with those details filled in, including the number of people you want.
   3. Open the public source links returned for each candidate and check that the person's name, role, organisation and relevant activity are current.
   4. Remove candidates whose role is unclear, whose information comes only from an unreliable source, or whose relevance is based on an assumption the sources do not support.
   5. Choose a small final shortlist and ask the chatbot to adapt the opening messages to the verified facts, without adding claims about your relationship or their work.
   6. Check each message against the person's public profile, then send individually through an appropriate public professional channel rather than using private or scraped contact details.

   Prompt

   I want to build a small, respectful networking shortlist in the UK.
   
   Industry or field: [industry]
   Target location or region: [location, or remote]
   My current background: [brief background]
   What I am trying to learn or move towards: [goal]
   Topics I can discuss credibly: [topics]
   Preferred connection types: [for example, practitioners, hiring managers, founders, researchers, professional community organisers]
   Number of people wanted: [number]
   
   Use only publicly available information. Find people who appear relevant through current company pages, professional profiles, conference or event pages, published work and reputable industry sources. Do not infer private contact details, personal characteristics or willingness to network. Do not recommend anyone solely because of protected characteristics. For each person, give their name, current role and organisation, public source links, why they fit my stated goal, one specific topic I could ask about, and a confidence note where their current role is uncertain. Prefer a varied shortlist of people at different career stages and avoid listing the same person twice.
   
   Then rank the shortlist by relevance, evidence that their role is current, and the likelihood that a brief professional message would be appropriate. Flag anything I must verify myself. Draft one short, specific, non-entitled opening message for the top three people, with no claim that I have read or admired work unless the sources support it. Do not suggest scraping, bulk messaging or contacting people through private details.

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

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

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.