Information at speed: Why AI-enabled search technology is the new competitive differentiator

WITH data holding immense value for organisations in today’s digital economy, the ability to retrieve and use information quickly can make a big difference in customer experiences.

As companies shift more operations to the cloud and expand across markets, they generate an avalanche of data: customer profiles, buying behaviour, app performance logs, security incident reports – the list goes on.

According to a 2024 Gartner report, over 80 per cent of data in most enterprises is unstructured, locked away in documents, messages, logs, images and videos.

Effective search gives every team member – from the C-suite to frontline staff – instant access to the insights they need from this data to drive greater employee productivity.

A chief technology officer can assess how the company’s cybersecurity infrastructure should be optimised and prevent downtime.

At the same time, a customer service agent can pull up a transaction history on the spot to resolve a problem faster.

With the right foundations, search capabilities can also go beyond text and keywords, and is capable of finding answers from audio, video, images and other forms of media.

As customer experiences become shorter and business decisions more complex, search capabilities that can understand user context and intent are critical to retrieve the right data at the right time.

By using the precision of search combined with artificial intelligence (AI), businesses can turn search into a competitive advantage.

This technology, referred to as Search AI, not only retrieves and analyses data but also generates the most relevant answers and accurate insights, ultimately improving customer experiences and boosting employee productivity.

Explains Ravi Rajendran, area vice-president of Asean, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea of Search AI company Elastic: “Data tells a story, and we need to find a way to unearth that story and act on it. It could range from organisational knowledge management to pinpointing the root cause of a service outage.

“Search AI enables companies to find the right data at the right time, so they can get insights from the data to inform their next major decisions.”

The business case

AI has come a long way since ChatGPT first made waves three years ago. Large language models (LLMs) can now reason well and engage in human-like conversations. However, they often stumble when asked for specifics or real-world context.

This means that for any organisation or business to fully explore the potential of AI, it needs not only a strong foundation of context-rich information, but also a powerful tool to search and draw insights from the data.

Enterprise search acts as the bridge between an LLM and a company’s proprietary data, unlocking fast and reliable access to information that an LLM needs to reason, act and automate at scale, with accuracy.

Elastic makes all of this possible through Search AI, enabling people to quickly find answers to their questions from any data – from text and log files to code, security events and more.

It can answer complex questions like, “I received an alert on my firewall, followed by an alert on one of my endpoint devices. What does this mean, and what should I do next?”

“Search AI is a force multiplier for security and IT teams in an organisation. Instead of having to go through thousands of logs, which may not be relevant to the task at hand, they can use Search AI to identify the most pertinent logs in a timely fashion,” says Rajendran.

“If a server suddenly is operating at full capacity from, say 50 per cent, an IT team can find logs from the lead up to this performance anomaly to find out what caused the spike in usage and take steps to address the problem.”

Booking.com, for example, uses Elastic to safeguard the business against threats, including account takeovers, malicious URLs and codes, and unwanted bot traffic.

The travel giant ingests 100 TB of data daily – increased almost three times from its previous volume of 35 TB – by automating data gathering, analysis, detection and response through Elastic.

Security teams can now gather more comprehensive insights, develop use cases that effectively help identify and prevent fraudulent behaviour, and strengthen defences as needed.

Elastic has also helped enhance team efficiency in terms of platform management – what once took four full-time engineers a day now takes about half a day for just one. This productivity boost has freed these specialists to deliver more, from better detections and automation to faster, more accurate investigations.

LG CNS, a leading IT services company in South Korea, has also significantly improved its internal search accuracy with KeyLook, a Search AI engine powered by Elastic.

KeyLook can combine three search methods – exact keywords, related terms and context-aware or semantic matching – to understand a user’s intent more accurately, even with typos or synonyms.

This hybrid approach has allowed employees to find relevant information across over 100,000 questions and 10,000 documents in Korean and other languages in less than half the time, boosting search accuracy from 75 per cent to 95 per cent.

At its core, the instinct to search – to find answers – is deeply human. In today’s digital-first world, that instinct is only growing stronger as people and businesses navigate an ocean of information every day.

For companies, this means that search can no longer be a back-end utility. It must be a strategic layer that maximises their data, improving security posture and enabling innovation.

Rajendran adds: “With Search AI, a business can find the relevant, trustworthy information it needs to produce accurate answers, identify trends and make quicker decisions.”

Learn how Elastic and Search AI can unlock measurable returns from your data.