AI people search: how it works, and the best tools available in 2026

AI people search tools help sales and recruiting teams identify professionals using criteria such as job role, company, location, expertise, and business contact information. The overview distinguishes among B2B professional-search platforms, conversational web-search tools, and platform-native services such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, comparing Exa, AI Ark, Jenova, HyperWrite, and LinkedIn by inputs, outputs, and pricing. It describes a typical workflow of defining target criteria in natural language, generating and validating a list of candidates, and enriching records with selected fields such as titles, profile URLs, emails, or phone numbers. Exa promotes its Agent API as a tool for producing schema-validated, cited JSON results from an index it says contains more than one billion person records, with separate charges for contact enrichment. The piece also advises users conducting name-based research to provide identifying context and verify source profiles, since web-based summaries can be incomplete or may conflate people with the same name.

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