You know the information exists somewhere in your company. You remember the meeting where your colleague presented it. You remember reading the email.

But now, when you actually need it, it's nowhere to be found. You ping colleagues on Slack. You dig through old email threads. No dice.

An annoyance, sure. But an expensive one. Not by itself, but in aggregate. It's a systemic problem that costs enterprises billions of dollars in lost productivity every year.

You know the company has the information you need. But where is it? And what can you do about it?

The Cost of Information Silos

The root cause of this problem is data fragmentation. As organizations grow, they adopt different tools for different functions. It’s the nature of things.

But over time this creates a labrynth of information silos. You have stuff scattered across Google Drive, and Salesforce, and Slack, and email, and buried inside spreadsheets with titles ending in final_final_final.xls.

Each has its own search function. But it’s cumbersome to go back and forth between these tools to cobble together what you need.

Traditional enterprise search tools try to fix this by indexing multiple sources. But they usually use keyword-based search, and don’t understand semantics or intent. So when you search for something like "Q3 product feedback," it returns every document that has those three words, whether it answers your question or not. Sure, the one you need is probably in there somewhere. But good luck finding it. Needle, meet haystack.

And so your sales team wastes hours preparing for client meetings, making bespoke decks because they one they remember using once that worked really well is impossible to find. Your marketing managers delay campaigns because they can’t track down the approved brand assets. Your analytics team spend days cobbling together data that should be instantly available.

It’s endemic. According to the American Productivity & Quality Center, knowledge workers spend 2.8 hours per weeksimply hunting for the information they need.

What Enterprise Search Always Wanted to Be

Google's newly launched Gemini Enterprise represents a major rethinking of how enterprise search should work.

Rather than just indexing documents and matching keywords, Gemini Enterprise creates what Google calls "Connected Intelligence". It’s a layer that connects to all of your organization's data sources, and understands the context and relationships within that information.

Now, your product manager prepping for their QBR can just ask stuff like, "What were the top three customer complaints about our mobile app in Q3, and what’s the relationship between them and our NPS score?" Within seconds, Gemini Enterprise will find the info from your customer service platform, your analytics dashboard, and your NPS survey results. And it will give an answer to the question, with specific data points and links to the source materials when relevant.

Breaking Down the Walls Between Your Data

What makes this possible is Gemini Enterprise's library of secure connectors. The platform integrates with the systems your organization probably already uses:

• Productivity suites like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 (including SharePoint and OneDrive)
• CRM and ERP Systems like Salesforce and SAP
• Collaboration Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams
• Cloud Datastores like BigQuery (it can also connect with any custom databases you might have)

Importantly, Gemini Enterprise’s connectors respect all existing permissions and access controls. So your team only sees the stuff they’re already authorized to access.

There’s no need to migrate data, or change your information architecture, or compromise on security. Gemini Enterprise works with your systems the way they currently are.

Use Cases Are Everywhere

It might sound like moving from keyword search to contextual intelligence isn’t a big deal. But it unlocks a host of use cases across functions and industries. A couple examples:

• Banking relationship managers can pull client data, transaction history and market trends together into a concise summary prior to client meetings (Banco SV is already doing this using Gemini Enterprise.)
• Customer service agents (human or automated) can access product information, order history, and troubleshooting guides in a single interface. Best Buy build this for their team and realized a 200% increase in customer’s successfully self-serving tasks like delivery rescheduling.
• Hospitals can streamline care coordination and improve outcomes by summarizing everything the organization knows about their patients. HCA Healthcare is already piloting a solution like this for nurse shift handoffs.

But Are We Ready?

A often-cited barrier to digital transformation initiatives has been the readiness of one’s data platform. Data is too messy, systems too old, teams too under-resourced to get their data foundations in place to make things happen. And in most cases that’s true.

But Gemini Enterprise provides a rare opportunity to begin a digital transformation journey without having to overhaul everything. You can start today, because the platform connects with your existing systems and works within your current security and governance frameworks.

The platform also has a no-code agent builder, which allows business users to create custom search experiences without developer support. A marketing manager can build an agent that knows the brand guidelines and has access to all approved creative assets. A finance analyst can create an agent that pulls real-time data from multiple financial systems and generates custom reports on demand.

While you ultimately want to get your data foundation in place to do larger wholesale transformations, Gemini Enterprise offers the definition of the quick win - one that creates immediate ROI and can build momentum for larger-scale change over time.

How to Get Started

Gemini Enterprise transforms enterprise search from a frustrating exercise into a powerful, conversational experience that understands your business and gives your team what they need. It finds documents faster, contextualizes them, and helps unlock the collective intelligence of your organization.

Ready to see how Gemini Enterprise can transform information access in your organization? Explore Gemini Enterprise, or contact us to discuss a pilot program tailored to your specific use cases.

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