Moveworks taps agentic AI to aid in enterprise search

Generative AI copilot company Moveworks Inc. today announced the immediate availability of a new enterprise search tool powered by an innovative new “reasoning engine” that’s better able to understand what users are trying to achieve.

The company is building on its flagship product, a generative artificial intelligence copilot that can be embedded into every enterprise system. It lives inside collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, and helps to find information and automate tasks on behalf of employees.

Moveworks’ copilot previously relied on “retrieval-augmented generation” to enable enterprise search. RAG is a technique that allows generative AI chatbots to tap into a company’s internal datasets and enhance its knowledge, but although this approach is effective, it does have a couple of drawbacks.

One of the problems with RAG systems is that they’re unable to determine which information sources should be trusted and prioritized. In addition, these systems can sometimes distort information when they cannot find the answer, a phenomenon known as “hallucinations.” In addition, RAG systems introduce challenges around permissions, integrations, scale, business context and visibility, Moveworks says.

Moveworks Enterprise Search overcomes these issues by instead relying on “agentic AI.” Instead of treating enterprise search as a simplistic information retrieval process, it provides a more dynamic, goal-oriented approach through its agentic reasoning engine. This allows it to understand the employee’s goal, develop a nuanced plan to help them achieve it, and then find the most relevant information that they’re looking for. In doing this, it can deliver higher-quality search results, the company insisted.

To reassure employees, each search result it generates is backed up by links to citations, so they have an easy way to verify it for accuracy. It also comes with simple integration tools, so enterprises can link the tool to any system of record they want to use. And there are granular permissions and access controls, so each user will only be able to search through data sources they’re allowed to access.

Moreover, Moveworks said, its new search tool has been built to handle extremely large data volumes. There are also analytics tools available, so team leaders can analyze how it is being used by their employees.

The startup believes that enterprise search is a killer use case for agentic AI, citing a 2019 study that shows how 49% of enterprise workers spend up to two hours a day searching for information they need to do their jobs.

“Leveraging agentic AI, we’ve solved many of the key challenges that basic RAG systems couldn’t overcome,” said co-founder and President Varun Singh. “Moveworks Enterprise Search provides employees with accurate, up to date and personalized answers, ensuring that enterprise search is no longer a pain-point, but instead a productivity driver.”

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