Just wrapped up using Elicit for a preliminary scoping review on customer data platform (CDP) adoption trends, and I have some mixed feelings. I was drawn to it because our RevOps team is constantly evaluating new tools, and the promise of automating that initial literature search was huge. We're talking Salesforce ecosystem analysis, HubSpot marketplace trends, the whole nine yards.
What worked surprisingly well was the speed of generating that initial corpus of papers. Typing in a relatively broad query like "benefits and challenges of enterprise CDP implementation" gave me a solid list of academic and industry papers I would have missed with a standard Google Scholar search. The ability to extract specific claims from the PDFs right in the interface saved hours of manual skimming. For a scoping review, where you're trying to map the landscape, that breadth is gold.
Where it started to fray was around the specificity needed for our actual use case. Elicit struggled with the more commercial, non-academic sources that are critical in the CRM space—think Gartner reports, specific vendor case studies, or detailed blog analyses from practitioners. The results felt heavily tilted toward peer-reviewed journals, which, while valuable, only tell part of the story for a business tool evaluation. I also found myself wishing for more nuanced filtering; sometimes the "relevance" ranking felt a bit opaque.
The biggest hiccup was in data extraction for synthesis. While it can pull out individual sentences or claims, building a coherent matrix of themes across all papers still required a lot of manual, outside-the-tool work. It felt like a powerful assistant for the "finding" phase, but the "organizing and synthesizing" phase still lived in my Notion docs and spreadsheets. For anyone in our field considering it: fantastic for accelerating academic literature review, but you'll need other systems to handle the practical, vendor-specific insights and to finalize your analysis framework. Has anyone else tried using it for a more business-oriented review? Curious if your experience matches.