Information is the lifeblood of any successful business. It empowers organisations to seize opportunities, make informed decisions, and allocate resources efficiently. Ready access to information ensures excellent customer experiences, mitigates risk, and fuels innovations. For instance, readily available market research data can help businesses develop targeted marketing campaigns and gain a competitive edge.

 However, a major challenge for many organisations is ensuring that the right information is readily available to the right people at the right time. As highlighted in Glean’s recent survey on employee needs, information accessibility can be a significant hurdle to workplace success:

In this focus feature, we will explore in-depth why information is crucial in this digital age and how innovative search capabilities can revolutionise information retrieval to help drive business success. In particular, this focus feature will delve into the following topics:

Information holds power, yet to harness this power, it needs to be readily available to the right people at the right time. When employees have easy access to information, they can make better decisions, solve problems creatively, ensure compliance, and more.

Put simply, information empowers employees to perform their jobs and drive the business forward.

This sense of empowerment fosters a feeling of being valued and integral to the organisation, leading to increased employee satisfaction and productivity. Studies by the University of Warwick and Saïd Business School at Oxford University show a clear link between employee happiness and productivity, highlighting the importance of empowering employees through access to information.

Thus, if information is the currency of success, then enabling employees to locate relevant information quickly, efficiently, and expeditiously has to become a business imperative.

Enterprise search is addressing this pressing need, allowing employees to find and retrieve information faster and more efficiently.

What Is Enterprise Search?

Enterprise search is a technology suite and strategy that helps employees find and access information—an email, a chat thread, an entire database, and more—stored in the different data repositories of an organisation. Its goal is to enable users to access the information they need to perform their jobs quickly and effectively by surfacing information and data within an organisation’s internal systems, databases, and repositories.

Think of enterprise search as a powerful tool that helps employees navigate the vast amount of information within their company. It’s like a personal assistant who can sift through documents, emails, reports, customer records, and product data to find exactly what’s needed, and much faster than a human assistant could.  Enterprise search excels at navigating complex data structures and disparate datasets to pinpoint the information employees need expeditiously.

For a visual representation of how advanced enterprise search works, you can check out this video:

Enterprises grapple with the management of extensive datasets encompassing HR records, financial transactions, customer interactions, and project details. The efficiency of information retrieval becomes paramount, allowing employees to access relevant data promptly and eliminating delays associated with navigating complex structures or manually searching through vast repositories. This immediate retrieval of information enables : 

Put simply, enterprise search efficiently connects people with the information they need. It fosters collaboration, compliance, and cost savings. It is an invaluable asset in the ever-evolving business and technology landscape, helping organisations achieve their goals and thrive in a data-driven world.

The previous chapters highlighted the importance of information accessibility and search in driving employee empowerment. Large language models and generative AI build upon this foundation, offering exciting possibilities for augmenting human capabilities and creating a more powerful, knowledge-based workforce.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are sophisticated AI algorithms that go beyond understanding human language. LLMs can not only comprehend the meaning of words and sentences but also use that understanding to perform various tasks. They achieve this by ingesting and processing vast amounts of data—detecting patterns, relationships, and word associations—and then learning from them with the help of neural networks.

At the core of this learning process lies a massive collection of text data called a text corpus. In some cases, LLMs are trained on datasets encompassing practically everything published on the Internet within a specific period, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.  This unsupervised learning process involves no pre-set instructions or human intervention. Instead, the LLM independently tries to decipher the structure within the data it ingests to understand the content and context. After adequate training, LLMs can be used in various ways, such as text prediction (e.g., auto-complete in Gmail).

Generative Power: Instructing the Machine

Some LLMs are generative, meaning they can create new data or content resembling the data they were trained on. These generative, prompt-based LLMs allow users to provide instructions, like directing a human peer, and the model will perform tasks as instructed, including answering questions, composing text formats, and finding information. A prime example is the generative LLM, ChatGPT, which has gained immense popularity.

Generative AI: A Brief History and Key Advancements

Generative AI, the foundation of generative LLMs, isn’t entirely new. Its roots trace back to the 1960s, with early applications powering chatbots. However, these early models were limited in their ability to create realistic and creative content. Significant advancements in recent years have revolutionised generative AI, propelling it into the mainstream.

One key advancement was the introduction of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GANs work by pitting two neural networks against each other, with one generating content and the other attempting to distinguish real data from the generated content. This competition drives the creation of increasingly realistic and creative outputs.

Other advancements include transformers, a new neural network architecture that improved how AI models process information, and the development of LLMs themselves. Models like OpenAI’s GPT series and Google Gemini emerged, capable of handling complex tasks like writing different creative text formats. These models also exhibit “few-shot learning,” meaning they can perform reasonably well on tasks they weren’t explicitly trained for by learning from examples provided in the instructions.

Another transformative advancement is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). This method involves training the model to output a numerical value representing human preferences, and then using these values for reinforcement learning. The results are highly coherent, believable, and well-crafted responses, making GPT-like LLMs both useful and popular for consumers and enterprises alike.

Effective enterprise search and AI adoption are vital for modern businesses, and aligning with the right technology partner can ensure success in both areas. Glean can be that partner, enabling souped-up enterprise search powered by generative AI.

Glean is an AI-powered work assistant founded by a seasoned team of former Google search engineers and industry veterans. Glean’s developers wondered why there was no easy, intuitive way to search for information within the disparate digital assets of an enterprise, and so they made it their mission to “bring people the knowledge they need to make a difference in the world.” Now, the company provides enterprises with the digital tools they need to find information in the fastest, easiest, simplest way possible.

With Glean, you can search for whatever information you need the way you do in an online search. You just type a keyword as you would when using Google, Yahoo! or Bing, or even use actual questions like, “What was our revenue in Q3 of 2023?” Within seconds, Glean’s software will surface a list of information related to your query for you to choose which one you are looking for.

Glean utilises generative AI—specifically Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which leverages the power of LLMs—to generate highly personalised answers grounded in your company’s unique enterprise knowledge graph. Critically, Glean’s built-in security features ensure granular access—meaning, some information can be accessed only by the right people in the right departments with the right access level. This means all answers are secure, private, permissions-aware, and fully referenceable back to source documentation in your enterprise.

Information is power, and Glean unlocks this power for everyone in your organisation. By facilitating knowledge sharing, data-driven decisions, and streamlined processes, Glean empowers employees, enhances customer experiences, and ultimately drives business success. With Glean, information is readily available at your fingertips, propelling innovation and maximising your bottom line.