Enterprise AI search software has become an incredibly valuable tool for businesses in today’s workplace. As companies adopt a growing number of SaaS applications, communicate daily over messaging platforms, and store more and more data in the cloud, content can become scattered across multiple silos. As a result, employees struggle to find the information they need amongst the endless documents, messaging threads, and collaboration files the interact with. In fact, according to Statista, the number of SaaS apps used by companies has grown every year since 2015.

Enterprise search is fast emerging as a powerful antidote to this issue. This guide will give you an understanding of what enterprise AI search is and how it works, as well as a rundown of the 10 best enterprise search platforms on the market in 2024. To get started, let's look at the definition of enterprise search software.

What Is Enterprise AI Search Software?

Enterprise AI search software gives businesses advanced search capabilities across all of their digital apps, content and data. Rather than just searching the open web, employees can find what they need within their company's knowledge base, intranet, document management systems, emails, and other information silos.

The key capabilities of enterprise AI search platforms include unified search that works across all connected data repositories, content analytics to provide insights, and intelligent recommendations based on each user's profile and search history. The software uses natural language processing, machine learning algorithms, and AI to understand the intent behind each query search and continuously improve relevance of results.

Enterprise AI search offers a range of benefits. It saves individual employees time that would have otherwise been spent trying to track down the documents, data, or information they need to get their work done. It also reduces the volume of ‘digital shoulder-tapping’ between teammates. It can help to increase productivity, efficiency, and the speed and quality of decision-making across all teams. Improvements in these areas are much-needed, with NPR reporting that worker productivity saw significant declines over the last few years.

Not all enterprise search products are the same, though. Before we dive into our list of the top 10, let’s first discuss the essential features for an enterprise AI search solution.

What Key Features Should an Enterprise AI Search Platform Have?

When evaluating enterprise AI search solutions, there are several features companies should prioritize:

• Speed and Accuracy: An enterprise AI search platform is only as good as the search algorithm and infrastructure that powers it. Employees need to be able to find documents, conversations, expertise and other information in milliseconds, without having to wade through duplicative or out-of-date results. They also need to know that the information they find is accurate and trustworthy.
• Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface: If the search interface isn’t intuitive, companies will struggle with adoption. Companies should look for solutions with natural language processing that understands queries and can auto-suggest results. The UI should offer easy filtering, saved searches and alerts for new matching content. Additionally, employees should be able to conduct a search from within whatever app they’re working in, without having to open a new tab.
• AI and Machine Learning: Leading enterprise AI search companies leverage the latest in generative AI technology to provide instant answers to employees’ questions. This technology also helps companies to improve knowledge quality over time by analyzing search queries and results to better understand employee needs and identify knowledge gaps.
• Secure Access and Permissions: The results generated by an enterprise AI search tool should match the permissions setting of the source material. That way, sensitive information remains visible only to those who should be able to access it. The best platforms provide companies with granular control over who can access and search different repositories.
• Integrations and APIs: With valuable information scattered across countless apps, it’s critical that an enterprise AI search platform offers advanced integrations and API capabilities. These enable the platform to crawl and index data from various content repositories like file storage systems, knowledge bases, SaaS tools and other scalable web apps where useful information may live. This provides unified access from one search bar.

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The 10 Best Enterprise AI Search Tools in 2024

1. Guru

Guru offers the capabilities of enterprise AI search, a modern wiki and an employee intranet in one powerful platform. Teams can connect their company's most popular apps to Guru and get instant answers they can trust, directly in their workflow. Employees can type in a query and get a unique answer, alongside a list of sources from which the answer was generated. They then ask an expert to verify the information, who then has the option of capturing it in Guru's knowledge base.

Watch our on-demand demo video to learn more!

2. Coveo

Coveo has developed a cloud-based artificial intelligence search and recommendation platform aimed at improving digital experiences. The platform combines semantic search functionality, machine learning-powered recommendations, and natural language processing.

Its product is aimed at helping companies enhance their customer-facing digital properties and internal knowledge management portals. Key features include semantic product search, personalized recommendations and AI capabilities to answer natural language questions.

3. GoLinks

GoLinks offers a software platform that creates shortened URLs, called "go links," that redirect to web pages and applications. The intent is to provide an intuitive way for employees to access company information and resources.

Core features of the GoLinks platform include conversational search powered by AI, a centralized dashboard for finding and managing go links and integrations with communication tools like Slack.

4. Algolia

Algolia provides a search and discovery platform that utilizes artificial intelligence extensively.

Its platform combines natural language processing and keyword matching to enable fast and relevant search experiences, and it can be used to build search experiences for web, mobile and voice applications that instantly surface relevant content at scale.

5. Elastic Enterprise AI Search

Elastic Enterprise AI Search is an open source search and analytics engine that provides developers with a toolkit to build customizable search applications and experiences.

The platform's key capabilities include out-of-the-box analytics and visualizations to optimize search operations, advanced relevance through customizable machine learning models and multiple search modes, scalable data ingestion capabilities and an active open source community supporting continued platform enhancement.

6. Glean

Glean offers an AI-powered search technology designed to help employees find relevant information across their company's systems and content.

The goal of the product is to provide employees with personalized and contextually relevant results when searching for information. It indexes and searches across a company's digital footprint, including content within a wide range of software apps and systems.

7. IBM Watson Discovery

IBM Watson Discovery is a cloud-based data insight and analysis platform. It enables users to discover information by allowing them to search and analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

The platform utilizes natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to understand topics, trends and key insights across multiple data sources.

8. Lucidworks Fusion

Lucidworks Fusion is an enterprise AI search platform designed to help large organizations connect their users with relevant data. The software aims to break down data silos by indexing varied data sources into one unified search index.

The platform utilizes open source search technology from the Apache Solr project as its core search engine. It also leverages Apache Spark for machine learning capabilities and applies machine learning algorithms during data ingestion to extract contextual insights.

9. AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform that employs artificial intelligence technology to provide insights to clients.

It gives users access to an extensive database of public and private content, including broker research, expert calls, private company data, SEC filings, earnings transcripts, regulatory content, news and trade journals.

10. Site Search 360

Site Search 360 offers a website search product that indexes pages, products, videos, FAQs and documents for searchability.

The platform utilizes crawling, sitemaps, feeds and API integrations to index website content and incorporates semantic search capabilities to connect related search queries to relevant results.

How to Choose the Best Enterprise AI Search Software for Your Team

As you can see from the list above, there are a lot of excellent enterprise AI search platforms on the market in 2024. The task of deciding which one best suits your company’s needs isn’t easy, but there are some key factors to consider when narrowing down your options:

1. Cloud vs. On-Premises: A key upfront decision is whether you want a cloud/SaaS solution or an on-premises installation. Cloud options require less IT overhead but on-prem allows for more customization and control. 
2. Industry-Specific Features: Look for enterprise AI search tools with capabilities tailored to your business vertical - healthcare, financial services, retail etc. You'll want industry-specific taxonomies, regulatory compliance, security levels and integrations out-of-the-box.
3. Budget and Scalability: Consider both current pricing and the ability to scale with more data, content sources and users over time. Balance capabilities with total cost of ownership over the lifetime of your use.
4. Ease of Use: The enterprise search platform you choose needs to be intuitive for employees across all roles. Poor user experience is one of the top reasons enterprise AI search implementations fail. It’s critical to prioritize UX and provide sufficient training resources to help employees onboard to the platform successfully.
5. Integrations with Existing Tech Stack: Review how easily each tool can connect bi-directionally with your existing content systems, collaboration software, DMS, databases and other business apps via API and indexes.

Bottom Line

What’s the best enterprise AI search software platform for your business? That’s a question only you can answer of course, but we hope this guide has been helpful as you research options. 

One thing that is certain is that there is a wealth of excellent products on the market in 2024. And with generative AI technology continuing to advance, the capabilities of today’s enterprise AI search options are only going to improve.

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