How to Build an AI Account Research Engine in Microsoft Lists

You can turn a Microsoft List of accounts into a research engine with Copilot in SharePoint and the Apify plugin. Select an account, run the prompt or click a quick step button, and Copilot researches the company on the web, saves what it found, writes an intelligence brief matched to the services you offer and updates the account’s row in the list.

The idea came out of an AI Concierge session with one of my clients, where we built the process together. In the video I run it on Culture Amp, from a list that also holds HubSpot, Cloudflare and Canva, and the whole enrichment for that one account cost 52 cents in Apify usage.

What does an account research engine in Microsoft Lists do?

The list is an account intelligence list. Each row is a company with its website, account owner, relationship notes and a fair bit of other metadata. Rows that have been enriched also carry an Open intelligence button, which opens an HTML intelligence page for that company.

The plugin brings in what’s happening outside your business. Apify is a web scraping, crawling and browsing service that goes out to websites and returns what it finds as clean data Copilot can work with. SharePoint already holds what’s happening inside the business, and in this build that means the list itself, a library of service offerings and a stakeholder map. The brief draws on both.

What do you need before you start?

• Copilot in SharePoint. It comes with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and so does the Ask Copilot action behind the quick step button.
• The Apify plugin. Plugins come from your organisation’s enterprise store, and your Microsoft 365 admin controls which ones are available. The Microsoft 365 roadmap lists plugin support in SharePoint in preview from August 2026, with general availability planned for December 2026. I cover finding and connecting plugins in connecting Xero to Copilot in SharePoint with plugins and MCP.
• An Apify account. My runs came out of free credits. After this build the account showed $1.08 used of $5.
• A list with somewhere to record the result. At minimum the company name and website, plus the columns the prompt updates. Mine had a status that changes to Enriched, a last enriched date and the Open intelligence link. If you’re building the list from a spreadsheet, creating a Microsoft List with Copilot in SharePoint walks through it.
• Something to match against. A service offerings library and a stakeholder map on the same site. Without them, the brief can only describe the company.

How to build it, step by step

1. Write the enrichment prompt. Mine is long, and the video only shows part of it. It tells Copilot to enrich the selected account intelligence item using Apify, save the research as a markdown file first, build an HTML brief from that markdown, then update the list item so you can keep track of what’s been enriched. Name the plugin in the prompt. I wrote “use the Apify plugin”, and Copilot’s thinking showed it identifying the tools it needed and planning the search before it called Apify.
2. Select an account and run the prompt. Select the row, open Copilot in SharePoint and run it. On Culture Amp, the row came back with the status set to Enriched, a last enriched date and an Open intelligence button, and the output appeared in the chat.
3. Check the markdown file. Copilot writes the research to markdown first and builds the HTML from it, so the markdown holds the detail of everything Apify scraped and found. Mine are saved in the Documents library, named account research, a dash and the list item ID. The naming is set in the prompt, so call them whatever suits you.
4. Review the brief, then publish it. The Culture Amp brief drew on eight records of content from the company’s website, recent LinkedIn posts, its scale and its hiring signals. Below that sat the opportunity card, the part I asked for in the prompt. It matched the account against the service offerings library, showed the evidence for each match, listed the stakeholders for each matched service from the stakeholder map, and finished with five discovery questions, a conversation opener and the account contacts from the list. I published the page from there.
5. Turn the prompt into a site skill. Ask Copilot to turn the prompt into a skill so that anyone on the site can select an item in the list and run the same enrichment. Copilot uses its built-in create skill capability, and mine came back as a site-wide enrich account intelligence skill. What are SharePoint skills and how do you build one explains where site skills live and who can run them.
6. Add a quick step column. Add a column to the list and choose Quick steps as the type. I called mine Enrich Data, added a new quick step named Enrich account data with the Ask Copilot action, and picked one of the prompts Copilot suggested: “Research this account and create an intelligence brief”. I added an instruction to use the skill we’d just created and set it to always show.
7. Click the button on a new account. On Canva, one click opened Copilot in the side panel and ran the prompt, which ran the skill and called Apify, with no long prompt to paste.

What to watch for

• Cost per account. I checked the runs page in Apify after the Culture Amp enrichment. The individual runs added up to 52 cents, and all of them succeeded. The figure covers Apify only; Copilot in SharePoint is licensed separately.
• The brief repeats whatever the list holds. The account contacts and relationship notes come straight from the list, so out-of-date details in a row go straight into the brief. Clean up the rows you plan to enrich first.
• Who can click it. The quick step needs Copilot in SharePoint, and the Apify plugin needs to be available in your tenant. Anyone without both needs another way to get the brief.
• The button runs the skill. Change the skill and every click changes with it. More on quick step buttons in what SharePoint quick steps are.

Build the service offerings library before you research a single account

Apify will pull website content and LinkedIn posts for any company you point it at. The Culture Amp brief was useful because of the opportunity card, and the opportunity card only exists because the site already held a library of service offerings and a stakeholder map for Copilot to match against. Leave those out and you get a well-formatted summary of someone else’s website. If I were starting this from scratch, I’d write up the service offerings first, one item per offering, with the kinds of signals that suggest a fit, and get the account owners to agree on them before anyone runs an enrichment.

I haven’t run it on other lists, but the same build should work on any list of organisations, such as a supplier register, as long as the site holds something useful to match each one against, like the categories you buy or the standards a supplier has to meet.

I like that the research is saved as markdown before anything gets formatted. The file sits in a SharePoint library under the site’s permissions like any other document, it’s named after the list item so you can find it later, and when someone questions a line in the brief you can go back to what Apify actually returned.

Permissions need a look before you roll the button out. Anyone with Edit on the site can change the skill and the quick step, so the person who owns the account process should own both (who can run and edit site skills). Relationship notes and stakeholder maps can be sensitive, so I’d keep the site to the people who work the accounts.

Apify is a third-party plugin, so it’s available only if your admin has made it available in the enterprise store.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to pay for Apify to use the Apify plugin in Copilot in SharePoint? Not for a trial like mine. Apify usage is billed to your Apify account, and my demo ran on free credits, with $1.08 used out of $5 by the end of the build. One full account enrichment cost 52 cents.

Where does Copilot save the account research? In my build, the research goes to a markdown file in the site’s Documents library, named account research followed by a dash and the list item ID. The HTML brief is published as a page, and the list row gets an Open intelligence button that links to it. The prompt sets the names and locations, so you can change them.

What’s the difference between the site skill and the quick step? The site skill holds the full enrichment instructions and is saved on the site at Agent Assets/Skills, so anyone with View access can run it. The quick step is the button in the list, with a short prompt that tells Copilot to research the selected account using that skill, and you manage it from Manage quick steps on the list. Editing the skill changes what every button click does.

Does the intelligence brief update when the company changes? No. It reflects the run that created it. Sort or filter the list by the last enriched date column to see which accounts are oldest, then click the quick step to run it again.