Enterprise Search (again) - Just don't call it a comeback!

The twenty-fourth episode of the podcast that you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts from and additionally in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). We're back to our usual format this time, so it’s three topics in (just a touch over) 30 minutes, and the show notes are as usual included just below the embedded video. Matt and Alan are in the chairs for this edition, this time discussing; our latest MMI research on AI and automation (that we've conducted with support from Hyland), that Enterprise Search appears to be back (again) and another instalment of how analysts add value (and when they don't).

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: New MMI available

As you know, we're not the greatest at telling people about the great work that we do, but that stops right now* with Matt and Alan discussing the "Deep Analysis Market Momentum Index™: Intelligent Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Data" report that we've recently launched with support from Hyland. It's packed with fresh research data on a range of topics around AI, automation and data, but for this segment Matt has picked out just two of the data points to discuss; 1. it's not a shortage of workers that's driving AI (and intelligent automation) projects and 2) data; important, disparate and often incomplete. The results of what is and what is not driving enterprise AI and the state of enterprise data will astonish (if not surprise) those of you with a passing interest in the subject.

(* we can't guarantee that this will stop now, unfortunately)

Topic 2: Don’t call it a comeback (Enterprise Search)

Alan's written a blog post - "The Revival of Enterprise Search: Lessons from the Past in the Age of Agentic AI" - in no small part inspired by the revival of lots of the use cases around Enterprise Search (if not the name itself, because of its terrible reputation for being a bottomless money pit). Here he discusses how the underlying problems have never gone away - as pointed to in the aforementioned research data - and how those challenges, with the more recent appearance of LLMs, have driven new interest in the technology. Much like last month's discussion about Agents (and the very common deterministic tasks vs less common probabilistic ones), the pair point to a very similar and not unrelated split in search query intent (Matt calls this recover vs discover).

Topic 3: Analyst Value (pt 2)

Finally, Matt and Alan return to the topic that they started in the last podcast of what makes great value for customers with industry analysts and what doesn't. This time Alan talks about "telling the truth" and "invented numbers" while Matt adds "super specialisms" and declaring "X is dead". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ9M8wxFTbA

Related Links for Series 4 Episode 2
You can download the Hyland sponsored "Deep Analysis Market Momentum Index™: Intelligent Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Data" here, for FREE.
If you missed the previous MMI report "AI and Unstructured Data Management, conducted by Deep Analysis with support from AIIM and M-Files", you can also download that for FREE too!
If you'd like to hear Matt and Alan discussing that previous MMI report, then you'll want to go back September '24's podcast for that, which you can find right here.