Despite the promise of AI assistants, the information bottleneck continues to plague organizations. The latest 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search confirms this reality: while 49% of employees use AI tools to find data, "36% of these users still struggle to access relevant information." The problem isn't just the AI, it's also what the AI is searching.
Generative AI has fundamentally changed the game. The expectation is no longer a list of documents or links, but a single, synthesized answer. This has transformed enterprise search from a simple retrieval tool into the foundational engine for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and the entire suite of AI applications that impact every corner of the business, from employee and operational efficiency to the end customer experience.
The Gartner report, which lists Squirro as a representative vendor for Enterprise AI Search, provides an essential map to navigate this fast-evolving landscape. In this analysis, we go a step further than a simple summary. We'll break down Gartner's key findings through a practical lens for leaders in complex, regulated industries, showing how to turn these concepts into a real-world competitive advantage.
Gartner's Enterprise AI Search Use Cases
Gartner categorizes the primary use cases for Enterprise AI Search into three distinct areas: Employee Experience (EX), Operational Experience (OX), and Customer Experience (CX). Here’s our take on what this means in practice.
Enhancing the Employee Experience (EX)
The Gartner report highlights a series of use cases that directly impact the employee experience. These include centralized digital workplace search, self-service IT and HR hubs, and dynamic intranet search. The goal is to make information effortlessly accessible, saving time, boosting efficiency, and increasing employee satisfaction.
For organizations in demanding sectors like finance, government, or manufacturing, the challenge goes beyond just connecting systems. It’s about doing so with robust security and precision.
At Squirro, we’ve helped organizations across industries overcome these challenges. Take the case of a leading multinational bank, whose customer relationship managers were spending up to 60 minutes preparing for a single client meeting, manually hunting for information across siloed systems.
By implementing the Squirro Enterprise GenAI Platform as a centralized AI layer, they were able to provide their team with a 360° dashboard view of all client-related documents and insights. The result was a dramatic supercharging of productivity, cutting meeting preparation time down from an hour to just three minutes and freeing up teams to focus on revenue generation and customer satisfaction.
Download the full case study here.
Optimizing the Operational Experience (OX)
The Gartner report further details use cases focused on streamlining back-office processes, such as R&D research, CRM augmentation, and ERP data retrieval. This is about equipping teams with the insights they need to make better, faster decisions.
Central to achieving such operational efficiency improvements is the ability to securely harness data from disparate data sources. The underlying challenge is often the sheer variety and complexity of the data sources, which can range from legacy databases to modern cloud applications, and the way the data is stored, in emails, pdf files that include text, tables, and images, enterprise platforms, and a variety of other formats.
As Squirro, we’ve helped Henkel, a global chemical and consumer goods leader, enhance their R&D process using our enterprise AI platform. Their technical community of over 3,300 users needed to access a vast knowledge base spread across 45 different internal and external sources. By implementing a unified, AI-powered knowledge hub, they were able to dramatically reduce duplicate analysis and connect researchers with internal experts.
Download the full case study here.
Transforming the Customer Experience (CX)
Gartner's report highlights the evolution of web search, product discovery, and customer service portals as central to transforming the Customer Experience (CX). Here, a key goal is to move beyond simple keyword search to provide direct, conversational answers that resolve issues on the first attempt.
For large organizations that include a service management component (and, let’s face it, that includes most of them), the primary obstacle to delivering exceptional customer service is inconsistent data gathering during case triage, which can lead to frustrating back-and-forth exchanges with customers. This not only prolongs the time it takes to resolve issues, it also dramatically increases the risk of potentially costly SLA breaches and erodes customer trust.
At Squirro, we tackled this issue head-on with a global telecommunications leader managing over 100 million IoT devices. Their service teams were struggling with a slow, manual ticket qualification process that averaged over seven hours per ticket. By deploying an AI-powered service management platform that automated ticket triage, classification, and routing, we helped them dramatically speed up service delivery and ensuring customers received consistent, accurate support from the very first interaction.
Download the full case study here.
Choosing the Right Platform for Regulated & Complex Industries
While the use cases are powerful, Gartner correctly notes that organizations in regulated sectors have "stringent data sovereignty and security requirements" that generic solutions often cannot meet. This is the core challenge that we began solving well before the advent of generative AI as we know it today.
The result is a precision-engineered enterprise GenAI platform provides the full power of generative AI without compromising on security, compliance, or control. Here’s how our approach directly addresses the market's most pressing needs:
- Deployment Flexibility (Including On-Premises): We offer multiple deployment options – from cloud to a robust on-premises solution – to meet critical data sovereignty and privacy needs, ensuring no sensitive financial or citizen data ever needs to leave a client's private network.
- Industry-Leading Security: Our ISO 27001 certified platform enforces scalable, document-level permissions. We utilize early-binding security trimming to ensure access controls from source systems are rigorously mirrored and enforced at query time, guaranteeing users only see what they are authorized to see.
- Hybrid Search for Deeper Relevance: We combine traditional keyword search with advanced semantic and vector search capabilities. Our proprietary algorithms are specifically tuned to understand the complex terminology and context found in legal, financial, and technical documents, delivering unparalleled relevance.
- The Power of Knowledge Graphs: We leverage and create semantic knowledge graphs to map the hidden relationships between people, projects, and data points. This allows a user to move beyond simple search to true discovery, enabling questions like, "Who are our internal experts on ESG regulations, and what key documents have they produced?"
- Ready for the Future with Multimodal Search: The enterprise data landscape is increasingly diverse. Our platform is built to ingest and understand a wide variety of formats, including text, images, and tables, and access real-time operational data from enterprise platforms using data virtualization to continually expand the scope of enterprise AI.
Build Your AI Future on a Solid Foundation
The findings from Gartner are clear: Enterprise AI search is the foundational engine for modern AI applications. It starts with improved information retrieval, but the full value of advanced enterprise search technology extends much further, serving as a foundation for tomorrow’s agentic AI applications and workflow automation. The use cases presented here demonstrate a clear path to value today, but enduring success demands a platform built for the complexities of the enterprise.
Ready to learn more? Download the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search today, or contact us for a demo to see how the Squirro Enterprise GenAI Platform can help you build your AI future on a foundation of security, relevance, and trust.
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