AI-Powered Enterprise Search: A More Effective Way to Find Information

Search is an everyday a part of most of our online experiences. We expect instant and accurate answers to our ad hoc questions as we navigate through our day. The expectation remains the same when it comes to searching for answers in enterprise data. However, with traditional data analytics, the search experience fails to match the ease, intuitiveness, and convenience of a consumer internet search. That’s why, AI-Powered Enterprise Search is the most efficient way to get insights from your enterprise data.

Understanding AI-Powered Enterprise Search

AI-Powered Enterprise Search refers to the process of retrieving insights from enterprise data spread over different locations in different formats through search that is powered, simplified, and personalized with AI. Using enterprise search, business decision makers across organizations can access the latest business data and use actionable insights to make accurate and timely decisions.

Enterprise search is 10 times more complex than a Google search. It requires a strong AI-powered architecture, well-researched logic, and carefully calibrated models. The search box may look simple but under its hood lies an intricate network of various technologies like natural language processing (NLP), ambiguity corrections, ranking models, prioritization models, natural language generation (NLG), and machine learning models and algorithms.

Unlike Google, enterprise search not only covers searching insights but also handles presentation of insights. This includes selecting the right visualization, displaying useful related insights, and adhering to the data governance and role-based information access policies. A properly implemented search technology can help organizations extract immense value from enterprise data and boost their enterprise data analytics strategies.

Core Components of AI-Powered Enterprise Search

Broadly speaking, AI-powered enterprise search consists of the following components.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

With NLP, users type their questions in simple language, without requiring to learn any SQL or depend on experts for guidance. AI-powered enterprise search understands the natural language, generates the SQL automatically to fetch the answer, and uses its generative content capabilities to present the answer in the form of text summaries, audio narratives, and visualizations that are easily understandable by the users.

Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Various machine learning models and AI algorithms enhance the enterprise search by identifying, calculating, and predicting outcomes correctly. These models and algorithms can extract actionable insights such as anomalies, outliers, analogies, clusters, trends, predictions, root cause analysis, and influential business drivers from enterprise data. They can be customized to address the specific business objectives of an organization.

Direct data connectors

AI-powered enterprise search uses the latest available data to search for insights using data connectors. These connectors directly connect to a variety of on-premise and cloud data sources. This eliminates the time, efforts, and risks in duplicating data and ensures that users always get real-time insights to make accurate decisions.

Query refinement

AI-powered enterprise search offers a variety of capabilities to refine user queries and ensures that they get the exact information they are looking for. The capabilities include ambiguity corrections, in-line prompts, search suggestions, and recommendations based on their past searches. If contextual ambiguity exists in search queries like similar words with different contexts or meanings, then it is also addressed by displaying all possible options so that users can select the desired one and not get an incorrect answer to their query.

Benefits of AI-Powered Enterprise Search

Here are some key benefits that organizations can enjoy by adopting AI-powered enterprise search for their enterprise data.

Improved accuracy of decisions

AI-powered enterprise search ensures that users have access to real-time insights whenever they need. By making the search intuitive and user-friendly, users become insight-driven and rely more on data rather than guesswork or hearsay. This eliminates errors and biases, reduces time-to-insight, and improves the accuracy of decisions based on trustworthy insights.

Better personalization of insights

With AI-powered enterprise search, business users can get personalized insights that are relevant for their role or work area. Enterprise search learns from a user’s past queries and topics of interest to offer search suggestions and business headlines so that users can reach insights faster. Data governance and information access policies are also taken into consideration while displaying the insights to ensure that only relevant people get access to relevant insights.

Greater understanding of root causes

By using AI-powered enterprise search, users can go beyond the “what” to find out “why” business changes happened. This helps them understand the root cause and identify key influencing factors. For example, using AI-powered enterprise search, a simple query like “sales in 2023” not only returns the sales figures for the year, but also provides the growth comparison to previous years, shows a breakup for sales by region, product, or store, and highlights anomalies if a particular region or product fared exceedingly well or had significant drops in sales along with influencing factors.

Increased productivity

Intelligent search enables users to ask business questions just the way they use internet search or ask a colleague. With intuitive search interfaces, users can get started with data analytics from day one, without going through extensive technical training. By removing dependency on experts and IT teams, business users can get quick answers to their business questions in real time. This improves their productivity, increases their confidence, and makes them better decision makers.

Better returns on analytics investment

AI-powered enterprise search helps organizations enable a data-driven culture, encouraging users to use analytics in a self-service way. This reduces the number of trivial requests for IT, increases operational efficiencies, reduces costs, and ensures quicker time-to-market. This way, organizations are able to increase their ROI on analytics platforms and plan better for the future.

How to select the best AI-Powered Enterprise Search platform

Here are some capabilities that AI-powered enterprise search platforms must have to ensure a great search experience for all users.

Conversational and user-friendly

When the search interface is simple, intuitive, and user-friendly, users feel more comfortable and inclined to use it. The support for natural language search is one of the most important capabilities for every enterprise search. Natural language search makes the search experience conversational and easy for users, such that they become self-reliant in using analytics better.

Personalized recommendations and suggestions

AI-powered enterprise search must have the ability to learn from what users frequently search and take into consideration their role and interests. This way, personalized actionable insights can be offered to users, allowing them to focus better with insights that matter to them and their work.

Adequate controls for users

While entering search queries, some users type conversational questions, some look for search suggestions, while some prefer dragging and dropping keywords in the search box. AI-powered enterprise search must support such different search behaviors. They must also provide options to save favorite queries, look up past searches, rank search suggestions they found helpful or not helpful, and add topics they want to follow to receive automated business headlines.

Contextual search and ambiguity corrections

The ability to identify ambiguity in users’ questions, interpret the expected intent, and provide the closest possible options helps in correcting and refining the questions to arrive at the correct answers. Same words can have different meanings and contexts. Questions like “sales in California” can be asked for both the state and the city of California. Having contextual search makes users aware of such possible choices and helps them choose their required context for search.

Integrated search

AI-powered enterprise search must be able to address information where they arise, that is in the native business applications that users use to perform their daily work and make decisions. Providing insights in the same environment ensures faster access to insights in a seamless manner, without distracting users from their work, or forcing them to switch between applications, or adapting to new interfaces. So the ability to embed search in business applications is important for enterprise search platforms.

Transparency

The AI-powered enterprise search must be transparent in terms of how it processes search queries. Visually presenting a breakdown of the search query into intent, entities, and attributes and explaining the query parsing process instills confidence among the users about the answers and insights they receive from search.

Usage patterns and search rankings

What and how users search provides an understanding on how to keep improving enterprise search. The ability to track usage patterns, identify frequent terms used for search, and user-rated search queries can help data engineers and analysts refine search logic and models to cater to the exact needs of the decision makers.

Elevate your Business Intelligence with MachEye's AI-Powered Enterprise Search

MachEye’s Intelligent Search is an AI-powered enterprise search technology that understands natural language, offers contextual search suggestions, performs ambiguity corrections, and interprets search queries accurately to deliver instant results in the form of text summaries, audio narratives, and interactive visualizations. With an intuitive search interface and intelligent search technology, MachEye empowers business users to perform their own analysis by simply asking questions in natural language.

MachEye’s AI-powered data analytics platform also makes data consumable with its interactive audio-visual stories and actionable with its advanced insights and root cause analysis. By providing an efficient way to search, retrieve, and consume insights from enterprise data, MachEye transforms business users into analysts and helps them make data-driven decisions better and faster.