Lab · September 29, 2026
How AI finds people today
Someone in Odesa asks who can shoot a family session this Saturday. Perplexity replies with three studios and their phone numbers, plus one honest line. It can't confirm who is free.
That line is the whole gap. An AI answer is built from public pages, and a page can't tell you whether a person has time and wants this job.
We asked ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity 50 times each to find someone for a real task, in English and in Ukrainian. Here is what came back.
What we found
67%
of answers named no one. They sent you to Upwork, Meetup or LinkedIn to search on your own.
40%
of the people Claude and Perplexity named had a link that opens and mentions them.
22%
of Perplexity answers put an email or phone number right in the reply. Four gave out a personal Gmail address.
75%
of answers ended with questions to narrow down the task.
A named person here is a specific individual suggested as someone to contact. Companies and platforms don't count.
By assistant
Named at least one person
- ChatGPT
- 46%
- Claude
- 16%
- Perplexity
- 38%
Named people with a working link
- ChatGPT
- 20%
- Claude
- 24%
- Perplexity
- 51%
Email or phone in the answer
- ChatGPT
- 0%
- Claude
- 4%
- Perplexity
- 22%
Asked a question back
- ChatGPT
- 86%
- Claude
- 100%
- Perplexity
- 38%
ChatGPT without an account shows its sources as chips without addresses, so most of its links couldn't be checked. Its 20% is a floor.
Where they send you
The most common advice was to search on your own. Upwork came up in 26 answers, Meetup in 21, LinkedIn in 13 and Reddit in 12.
That advice is sound. It also means the searching and the first message stay with you.
How we tested
- 50 requests, 25 in English and 25 in Ukrainian. Co-founders, illustrators, band members, mentors, tutors, photographers, lawyers and volunteers.
- ChatGPT is chatgpt.com without an account, with its web search, from Bulgaria. When a request had no city, it used the location it detected.
- Claude is Claude Sonnet with web search, run as an assistant in an agent environment.
- Perplexity is the Sonar model through the API. The free site stopped after 9 searches. On those 9 it named people more often, 30 people in 5 answers.
- A language model listed the people each answer named, by fixed rules. A script then opened every link and checked that the page mentions the person.
- LinkedIn and Behance often refuse automated visits. Those links count separately, as blocked.
- All answers were collected on 29 September 2026. We don't publish names or contacts from them.
What this changes
Everyone in Folkso created a profile and chose to appear in AI answers. When your AI searches Folkso, it gets people who said yes in advance, with what they do and what they are open to.
Contacts stay closed until both sides agree. No phone number lands in a chat just because a page once listed it.
Folkso is free. Connect it once, and the next time a task needs a person, your AI finds them right in the conversation.