The Research Tool is your thinking partner. It’s designed to hunt through CRF’s trusted research library and resources to support deeper thinking.
You can access a simple ‘How to’ guide here to get started with using the Research Tool.
Simply ask a question and receive a concise, tailored response – grounded in applicable insights exclusively from CRF’s library of research and resources.
Whether you’re building a business case, writing a board paper, exploring new initiatives or deepening your understanding of HR strategy, CRF’s Research Tool is your thinking partner.

The Research Tool is designed to help you navigate CRF’s research library, ask questions, receive tailored, trusted responses and apply insights to your business context.
It is not designed to:
– Use sources outside of CRF’s trusted library of research.
– Allow uploads of external documents.
– Answer questions about your specific business.
– Provide specific benchmarks.

If the Research Tool is unable to answer your question or provide an adequate response, we welcome your feedback so we can continue to improve.

You can rate answers using the thumbs up/down icons and you’ll have the option to leave further comments. These will be picked up by your client partner who will be in touch to discuss how we can support you further.

Alternatively, you can contact Toby Hargreaves or call us on +44 (0)203 750 3501.   

Your data is protected with enterprise-grade security. It’s encrypted in transit and at rest, stored in dedicated UK-based Microsoft servers, and processed only to answer your query and improve your organisation’s Research Tool experience, not to train public models.
Access is limited to you and a small number of CRF support engineers under strict controls, only when you ask for help.
For extra peace of mind, please avoid putting highly sensitive personal or confidential company details into your questions.

Yes. The Research Tool is designed with data privacy and protection in mind. Any personal data entered during interactions is processed in line with GDPR and applicable data protection regulations. No personally identifiable information (PII) is stored or used beyond the session unless explicitly required and consented to.
As with any AI platform, we recommend that commercially sensitive, organisation-specific and personal data should not be entered.
For more information on CRF’s privacy policy, please click here.

Yes — but only for your convenience, and always under strict controls.
Why we keep it: The Research Tool saves your questions and the answers it gives, so you can pick up the conversation the next time you log in.
How it’s protected: The chat history stays encrypted in our UK data centre and is never shared with third parties or fed back into the AI model for training.
Internal use: CRF may analyse the data in fully anonymised, aggregated form (e.g., “most-asked talent topics this quarter”) to improve services and shape future research. No individual or organisation can be identified in that process.
Your control: You can export or delete your chat history at any time, and we encourage you not to include highly sensitive personal or confidential company details in your queries.

Users should not input personal, confidential or commercially sensitive information. The Research Tool is built to provide research-backed answers based exclusively on CRF’s trusted resources – not to manage private data.

The Research Tool is hosted in dedicated, UK-based Microsoft servers located in Southern UK. Access to these servers is exclusive to CRF – no external or third parties can or will have access.

Not right now. The Research Tool answers from CRF’s own research library and doesn’t accept external files.
Users should not input personal, confidential, or commercially sensitive information.

The Research Tool architecture is retrieval-augmented and citation-driven, so hallucinations are rare. It speaks only when it can ground a statement in CRF research, it shows you exactly where that evidence lives, and it stays silent – or calls in a human – when the evidence isn’t there. No AI is perfect, though, so treat the citations as your audit trail and let us know if anything doesn’t look right.

The Research Tool can currently only output in text format. However, as part of the ongoing roadmap, we will have added functionality including different output formats and translation services. More details will be communicated in due course.

Yes. Each answer will provide citations and links to the CRF source so you can read the original research.