What Is AI-Assisted Research?

A practical overview of what agentic AI systems can do for researchers.

Course abstract · by Sergueï Spetschinsky, PhD

Course content. You hear constantly that AI will revolutionize research, but you are yet to see any of it with your own eyes. In this course, you see what personalized agentic AI systems (AI that knows your specific context, works in your files and apps and carries out tasks autonomously for you) can do for researchers. We look at them one by one, then together:

• an AI writing assistant, built from your own texts, in your own style;
• an AI thinking partner, set up to question and criticise your work from the perspectives you choose;
• an AI second brain, a personal knowledge base built from your own literature and notes;
• an AI that works in your files and apps and takes on the tasks you repeat;
• vibe coding, building your own software by describing it in plain language, without learning to program;
• and all of these working together as one unified system: a personalized, semi-autonomous research assistant.

For each system, I show it working on a real task and explain why it works and where it fails. This is an introductory class, where you try some of these systems with your own material but do not learn to fully build and use them. You leave with a practical knowledge of what AI can do now for your research with the right skills, and a sense of what it may promise in the near future. You can then decide what to learn next, both for your research and for your professional future.

Goals. You learn to:

• explain what each system in this course is, how it works and what it can and cannot do for your research;
• use some of them on small tasks of your own;
• give an AI the context a task needs, and write first instructions for it;
• check what a system gives you back, and see where it went wrong;
• argue where your own work counts most as research comes to carry a layer of AI assistance;
• decide what to learn next, for your research and for your professional future.

Format. Every course can take different shapes: in person, online or both, as one intensive block or spread over several weeks, shorter or longer. Length, format and all practical details are open: we agree them together, and I adapt the course to what your institution needs.

Interested for your programme? Write to me →