As part of our recent AI contest where employees shared innovative ways they're using artificial intelligence in their daily work, we received some truly impressive submissions. Today, we're highlighting a particularly clever solution from Ian Bowman-Henderson, Managing Director at Factua Labs , that transforms time-consuming research into an automated process.

The Challenge: Finding the Right Contact Information

Anyone who's worked in sales, marketing, or business development knows the struggle of finding accurate contact information for prospects. The traditional approach involves hours of manual research—scouring LinkedIn profiles, testing different email formats, and piecing together contact lists one name at a time. Ian faced this time-consuming challenge and decided to leverage AI to automate the entire process.

The AI-Powered Solution

Instead of relying on existing tools, Ian Bowman-Henderson, Managing Director at Factua Labs , took to ChatGPT to build a custom automation that tackles the problem in two phases:

Phase 1: Employee Discovery The tool takes any company name and scrapes LinkedIn to compile a comprehensive list of employees at that organization. Then, it passes the unstructured results data back through an LLM to validate quality.

Phase 2: Email Validation Here's where it gets clever. The system investigates common email syntax patterns, uses mathematical approaches to test these patterns, and validates which email format the target company actually uses. The result? A complete contact list with employee names, company domains, and validated email addresses.

The AI Advantage in Tool Selection

What struck us most about this approach was how AI helped navigate the crowded landscape of business tools. As Ian explained: "There tends to be lots of overlapping SaaS products in a space, all of which claim to do everything, but because you're giving your full scope of work to an AI partner at the beginning, it's able to find the ones that really do fit your use case even when that information might not be readily available on their website."

Ian's experience has been consistently positive: "Every new tool that it's introduced me to really has been the right tool for the job as I got into it, even if every individual implementation step that it recommended didn't end up being the exact way that I did it."

This insight highlights one of AI's most valuable capabilities—cutting through marketing noise to identify tools that genuinely match specific requirements.

Results and Looking Forward

The automation produces a detailed table showing not just contact information, but also which email syntax was determined to be correct for each company. This data allows for more efficient future outreach by testing the most successful patterns first.

Importantly, Ian designed the tool with privacy considerations in mind—rather than directly emailing discovered contacts, the output integrates with CRM platforms for proper, compliant outreach processes. The development process itself proved equally valuable as a learning experience that Ian is now applying to larger, more complex projects.

This submission perfectly demonstrates how AI can transform routine but time-consuming tasks into efficient, automated processes, combining research capabilities with custom tool development to create practical, scalable solutions.

This is the second post in our series showcasing innovative AI applications from our employee contest. Check out our previous feature on how Jen uses AI to elevate creativity in design , and stay tuned for more inspiring AI innovations from our team.