Can an AI agent replace a workforce data vendor?
Often yes for a single lookup today, but for thousands of people tracked over months the hard part is knowing what changed and when, which is what Live Data Technologies records.
Live Data Technologies records job changes: who joined a company, who left, who was promoted and where people went next. The data is compiled from public information on the open web, collected since 2019, and records are re-checked on a continuous basis.
What does an AI agent actually get you?
An agent searches the public web when you ask and reports what it finds at that moment. That works well for a quick lookup: a founder before a meeting, a hiring manager, a handful of names.
What comes back is a snapshot. It often can't tell you when the person changed roles, whether the page it found is up to date, or what job they held before.
| You need to know | One-off agent lookup | Maintained workforce dataset |
|---|---|---|
| Who holds this role today? | Whatever the web shows when you ask | The latest recorded job, with its dates |
| When did they move? | Often unclear | A dated event: joined, promoted or left |
| What changed across 2,000 companies since you last looked? | One search per person, every time you ask | Changes across your list, sent by webhook or a daily file |
| Is the record still right next quarter? | Only if you run the search again | Re-checked on a cycle |
Why track the job change, not just the title?
A title is a fact about today. A job change is an event with a date, and it is what most teams act on: a CFO leaves a portfolio company, a champion starts somewhere new, a team loses its senior engineers one by one.
If your data can't say when a change happened, you can't tell a move from last week from one that happened last year. And not every edit is a move. A reworded headline or a small title tweak at the same company is an update. The changes that matter are joins, exits and promotions.
Should I build an AI agent to search the web for job changes, or buy a people dataset?
Answer these before you commit engineering time, whichever way you go.
- What does a check cost at your volume?Count the people you track, times how often you check each one in a year, plus retries when a search fails.
- How will you date a change?Decide whether you record when the change happened, when you first saw it, or both. The two can be months apart.
- How will you match results to the right person and company?Plan for shared names, rebrands, mergers and subsidiaries before the first run.
- What happens when a profile goes quiet?People make profiles private or stop updating them. Decide whether you drop them, flag them or keep the last known job.
- Who handles privacy obligations?Collecting information about people brings duties: honouring opt-out requests and, in some US states, registering as a data broker.
Try it on your own list
Send us a list and we will show you which records are stale and what changed.