Enterprise Search Use Cases

In today’s world of information overload, enterprise search helps organizations discover, organize, and manage their own knowledge. This includes the firm’s internal proprietary content, as well as any external data the firm may have access to. Enterprise search tools allow organizations to aggregate vast repositories of company data, and ensure all their content is easily discoverable and shareable across the enterprise.

With the advent of generative AI (genAI), enterprise search has taken on a new meaning. The integration of genAI technology can streamline the entire search process to markedly improve precision and productivity for enterprises. This is because genAI can understand the context of a query, recognize synonyms, and even learn from user behavior to deliver more accurate and personalized results over time. 

That’s why most enterprise search tools of today leverage genAI—a functionality that is particularly crucial for clients who deal with large, complex datasets. 

Below, we will cover the top use cases for enterprise search, from knowledge management to customer support and supply chain management, as well as some of its advantages and limitations. We will also explore how AlphaSense differs from other enterprise search tools to help you decide on the right search tool for your business goals.

Related Reading: Guide to Enterprise Search: Use Cases, Benefits, and Considerations

Top Enterprise Search Use Cases

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is one of the most notable use cases for enterprise search and refers to the ability to sort through, access, and share information from the vast amount of data generated within an organization. This could include internal data such as training materials, customer surveys, company playbooks, employee guidelines, and privacy and security policies. It could also include external knowledge, such as competitive data, news, and any primary or secondary research.

With the sheer amount of data that enterprise organizations must keep track of, an effective knowledge management system is imperative to maintaining organizational efficacy and gaining a competitive advantage. Without a knowledge management system, finding critical insights within an organization’s knowledge base becomes akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack. Inevitably, working this way also leads to lost opportunities and a higher likelihood of falling behind competitors who are leveraging innovative enterprise search. 

Enterprise search provides companies with a centralized and efficient approach to accessing and disseminating their knowledge across the entire organization. It allows users to search for and retrieve relevant information quickly, promoting collaboration and reducing duplication of efforts. Moreover, with advanced search capabilities like genAI, users can find necessary insights quickly, even within large and diverse datasets.

Customer Service

Enterprise search can be instrumental in supporting customer service workflows. To properly support customers, employees need easy access to customer data, company policies, and detailed information on products and services that your business offers. That way, they can provide accurate and personalized answers to customers’ questions, as well as address customer complaints and issues according to their company’s guidelines.

Enterprise search can also enable companies to create self-service portals for their customers. In these portals, customers can find answers to their questions through a searchable knowledge base, which can save customer support teams valuable time and provide a better experience for the customer. 

Additionally, integrating genAI with enterprise search can enhance your customers’ self-service and agent support experience by delivering faster, more precise answers and recommendations—automatically generated based on your firm’s data and past interactions with customers.  

Compliance and Legal Research

When it comes to legal matters, having easy and quick access to the right documentation is critical. In the event of an investigation, a company must be able to prove that it acted lawfully and in accordance with compliance. Enterprise search makes it easy to find the right document instantly.

Additionally, a company’s data storage and retrieval must comply with legal and regulatory requirements. Therefore, it is critical that companies implement a secure system that makes it easy and safe to locate and manage sensitive information. 

This is why an enterprise search tool must meet industry standards for compliance and data privacy and conduct regular, accredited third-party penetration testing—particularly if your company deals with sensitive data.

Business Intelligence

Enterprise search can be a useful tool for conducting effective business intelligence. An enterprise search solution—particularly one with generative AI capabilities—can be used for large-scale data analysis and trend identification. 

Enterprise search can help with data analysis by aggregating and analyzing data from multiple sources to generate valuable insights and reports. It can facilitate trend identification by searching through large datasets, including both structured and unstructured data, to uncover trends and patterns.

Hiring and Talent Management

Enterprise search makes it easy for new employees to easily access human resources (HR) policies, benefits information, and training materials. It also helps HR employees identify and hire internal candidates for roles, as they can easily search through resumes, performance reviews, and training records in the company database. 

Enterprise search also helps ensure that existing employees have access to all the necessary information they need to learn new skills and stay up to speed on company knowledge. All of this increases the overall efficiency and efficacy of the organization.  

Product Development and Innovation

The main way enterprise search encourages effective product development is that it facilitates better collaboration for research and development (R&D) teams, enabling them to quickly find and share relevant research papers, technical documents, and patents.

In terms of innovation, enterprise search facilitates the collection and retrieval of innovative ideas and feedback from employees, customers, and various stakeholders to expedite the product development process. By having all ideas and relevant information stored, indexed, and easily searchable in one place, companies can avoid many of the common pitfalls of innovation and product R&D.

Market Research

Unlike the majority of the aforementioned use cases, market research is a rare use case for an enterprise search platform. In order for an enterprise search tool to be used for market research, it must aggregate not only internal company information, but external information as well.

In order to take their market research to the next level—in terms of efficiency, speed, comprehensiveness, and confidence—organizations need an enterprise search tool that is equipped with advanced search capabilities like natural language processing (NLP) and genAI. The search tool can then extract relevant insights from both your internal and external data—in seconds and with heightened accuracy.

Enterprise search can support market research in the following key ways:

• Competitive Monitoring and Benchmarking – By importing all competitive information into one place, companies can more quickly get new members up to speed on competitors, as well as avoid duplicative information gathering efforts. Employees can also get a better idea of their competitors’ product offerings by searching through product manuals and documentations or engineering manuals.
• Portfolio Monitoring – Enterprise search enhances the ability to track and anticipate market movements, so as to better manage portfolios. Financial services firms can use an enterprise search platform to make their intellectual property (IP) more discoverable and actionable by aggregating historical perspectives, pitch decks, deal memos, investment theses, and more. Especially for clients evaluating a large number of deals per year, this is a massive efficiency gain.
• Market Landscaping – An enterprise search platform with genAI capabilities enables consulting and corporate companies to quickly understand the most important things about any company or market. By effortlessly searching through both their own historical data, strategy decks, and business cases, as well as relevant external market data, companies can extract the most valuable insights on their market landscape without wasting time on getting into the weeds of irrelevant documents.
• Earnings Prep – Enterprise search can support earnings research for investor relations and corporate development professionals by enabling them to quickly spot trends in the questions being asked and how competitors are responding—without the fluff. With a genAI-powered tool, clients can upload their own earnings transcripts into the platform and use keyword search to check the sentiment of the transcript. 

AlphaSense allows you to import your internal research and then search and extract insights across our vast content universe, as well as your own internal content. You can then apply our artificial intelligence search functionalities to your internal research, enhancing the speed and comprehensiveness of your research process. 

Enterprise Search Platforms: Strengths and Limitations

Enterprise search solutions increase productivity, efficiency, and cohesion across an organization by organizing the company’s entire body of knowledge—and then making it searchable, indexable, and shareable.  

Below, we dive into some of the top enterprise search solutions available today, as well as their strengths and limitations, so that you can choose the right solution for your organization’s needs. 

For even more details on top enterprise search engines, check out our buyer’s guide: Best Enterprise Search Software in 2024.

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a secure, end-to-end market intelligence platform powered by 10+ years of AI development for business and financial professionals looking to centralize their proprietary internal content, alongside a premium collection of 300M+ external documents.  

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recognized by Forbes as a top 50 AI company in 2023. 

While most enterprise search platforms do not offer any external market intelligence out of the box, many allow you to import your own external sources if you have access to them. AlphaSense offers all-in-one market intelligence by integrating the internal and external content of your enterprise with its expansive content universe to maximize your research, enhance team productivity, and increase collaboration.

Strengths:

• Aggregates a vast universe of premium content, including company documents, news, broker research, and expert transcripts
• Has advanced AI search capabilities such as synonym recognition, sentiment analysis, genAI that help quickly extract crucial insights from both internal and external data to filter out irrelevant noise
• All-in-one platform that eliminates the need for multiple tools or open tabs
• Provides automated and customizable alerts
• Has internal messaging and collaboration features
• Provides support for APIs and integrations
• Provides enterprise-grade data protection complying with global security standards: SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140–2, SAML 2.0
• Has an excellent customer support team

Limitations:

• Visualization tools are limited at this time
• Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
  

Hebbia

Hebbia is a search engine and large-language model (LLM) productivity tool. Powered by AI and machine learning, Hebbia generates valuable insights from public and private content through a combination of chat-style search and genAI. Hebbia focuses on sourcing internal content first—including PDFs, transcripts, PowerPoint presentations, and other documents—with its ability to “index anything.” Then, it sources external content from company websites, news sources, and financial reporting data. 

However, Hebbia only has access to publicly available content, and the platform provides limited industry expertise. Companies and professionals rely on Hebbia to streamline and automate their research and due diligence processes, without compromising on accuracy. 

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs Hebbia

Strengths:

• Can index any document of any type, via portal or API
• Features intelligent semantic search
• Pre-indexes company filings and research
• Supports uploads of private company data
• Offers a full suite of collaborative tools and access controls
• Utilizes AI technology to understand the context of your query
• Features end-to-end encryption

Limitations:

• Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
• Only able to access public content; limited industry expertise
• Must import data from external sources
• Does not have access to proprietary content sources, such as broker research or expert calls
• Lacks sentiment analysis capability
• No company insights, snapshots, or tearsheets

Algolia

Algolia is an end-to-end AI search and discovery platform. It enables its customers to build fast and powerful search and discovery experiences for their in-app users and/or online visitors by surfacing the desired content instantly and at scale. 

Algolia’s main customers include B2C ecommerce, B2B ecommerce, marketplaces, media, and SaaS.

Strengths:

• Powerful indexing system, with a distributed database of networks around the world
• Utilizes proprietary NeuralSearch technology that combines vector-based natural language processing with keyword matching
• Useful tool for ecommerce companies that are interested in creating a great search experience for their customers

Limitations:

• Price increases dramatically as client company scales
• Limited customization is possible

Coveo

Coveo is a cloud-based intelligent enterprise search engine that uses AI recommendations and personalizations to increase the relevance of every user’s experience. Coveo uses connectors and APIs to find results, regardless of format, and content can be accessed no matter where it’s located thanks to the easy indexing and unified search experience. Additionally, Coveo integrates seamlessly with your company’s tech stack, simplifying and streamlining the search experience. 

Strengths:

• Customizable to your organization’s unique needs
• Most connectors, plugins, crawlers are available out-of-the-box
• Strong integration capabilities, particularly with Salesforce

Limitations:

• No semantic search which means search results are less precise and relevant
• Sorting and filtering capabilities are weaker than competitors’

Guru

Guru is an AI-powered enterprise search tool that integrates seamlessly into existing workflows. Customers appreciate Guru for centralizing all company knowledge in one place, helping with new hire onboarding, ensuring alignment across the organization, and facilitating better cross-functional collaboration.

Strengths:

• Works well as a library for a company’s processes, knowledge, and useful information
• Integrates seamlessly with tools like Slack and Zendesk
• Integrations make it easy to find and create content

Limitations:

• Lack of out-of-the-box external content for market research
• The trial version is limited in some access features
• The search functionality is not very intuitive and requires knowing exactly what you are looking for

Glean

Glean is an AI-powered workplace search, leveraging deep learning for vector search. With intuitive, context-aware search capabilities across all company apps, Glean delivers relevant and highly personalized results and empowers you to discover the information you need.

Customers refer to Glean as “Google for the internal workspace,” citing the powerful and customizable search functionality that helps find any topic, project, or technology at work.

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs Glean

Strengths:

• Powerful search functionality with advanced filtering capabilities
• Generative AI features that make search even easier and more precise
• Makes it easy to find the answer you are looking for across various platforms (Notion, Slack, Google Suite, etc.)

Limitations:

• Glean does not have proprietary or premium external content sets on its platform, as focus is only on internal content sourced

Unleash

Unleash is a cloud-based enterprise search platform that allows you to search across all of your organization’s apps and knowledge library and find all the information—emails, receipts, images, records, and anything else—in one place. Unleash uses the power of AI and semantic search to understand your search intent and any synonyms of your query, to deliver the most precise and relevant insights.

Strengths:

• Uses AI and semantic search to understand related keywords and synonyms 
• Seamlessly integrates with company portals
• Easy to install, configure, and use

Limitations:

• Lack of out-of-the-box external content for market research
• Requires a subscription
• Some limitations when using company’s infrastructure instead of their cloud

Enterprise Search With AlphaSense

At AlphaSense, we understand the importance of having a product that delivers the quality results and promise of security every enterprise requires today. Our Enterprise Intelligence solution boasts secure end-to-end encryption to protect your information and streamline your ability to search and ask questions across both your internal research documents and premium external market intelligence sources. 

By leveraging multiple concurrent data connections across the full spectrum of diverse content management systems, AlphaSense offers a unified content set and federated search experience that fully indexes and scores documents for easy retrieval via our search, dashboards, alerts, and a natural language chat experience. 

AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence includes the following key features:

Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library

AlphaSense allows you to combine valuable internal content and 10,000+ private, public, premium, and proprietary external data sources into one platform. We have purpose-built our platform to keep teams up to speed on the relevant topics and companies driving your market.

Our external content sources include trade journals, news, and SEC and global filings. AlphaSense users also have access to two premium and proprietary content offerings. These are:

• Wall Street Insights® – A collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.

• Expert Transcript Library – 45,000+ transcripts of one-on-one calls with industry experts, competitors, customers, professionals, and former and current executives, with the ability to conduct your own personalized expert calls for less.

AI Search and Summarization Technology

Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time. 

Our current suite of tools includes:

Smart Summaries

This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. Each Smart Summary provides you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the summaries are sourced—combining high accuracy with easy verification.

Generative Search

Generative Search is a genAI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Whenever you search for information, Generative Search is there to summarize key company events, emerging topics, and industry-wide viewpoints. You can dig deeper into topics by asking Generative Search follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query.

Smart Synonyms™

This unique feature is proprietary to AlphaSense and has the capability to understand search intent behind any of your queries and populate results that include variations in business language. For example, a search for total addressable market (TAM) might also bring back results on market size. 

Relevancy Algorithm

AlphaSense’s advanced algorithm eliminates noise (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your specific search objective) and surfaces only the most relevant results. This algorithm saves you precious time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.  

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. 

This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of sentiment analysis to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies. 

Integration Capabilities

Through either an AlphaSense-managed solution in our secure cloud or a customer-managed solution in the cloud of your choice, customers can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or Enterprise-Grade Connectors—like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, S3, and more. Enterprise Intelligence supports the upload and management of tens of millions of documents.

Additionally, our content processing and content management features enable company recognition within user documents, as well as custom tags and folder structures for better internal content organization and an enhanced user experience. 

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond search and summarization to help users accelerate research tasks.  

• Customizable Dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored real-time alerts provide real-time updates.
• Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook+ and commenting features help teams manage and share insights more effectively.
• Table Tools allow you to move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizations directly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis. 
• Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• Our Black-lining feature allows you to automatically identify any quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) changes in SEC filings.
• Automated Monitoring allows you to set up real-time alerts that send instant updates on any relevant market movements, news, emerging trends, and competitor activities. The platform also generates snapshots of companies and topics regularly that keep you ahead of the curve with actionable insights.

Accelerate Your Market Research With Enterprise Search

If you need a secret weapon for enhanced and accelerated market research, look no further than AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence. Where other enterprise search platforms are limited to a back-end perspective—providing insight into company policies, internal knowledge, training materials, etc.—AlphaSense combines the power of your internal knowledge with access to premium external data, as well as advanced AI search, as well as to take your market research and business strategy to the next level.

Discover the power of enterprise search with AlphaSense. Start your free trial of AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence today.