Companies Bet on AI to Cut Through Digital Clutter

Companies have hundreds of apps and documents, and employees spend hours searching through them.

One artificial intelligence startup thinks it has a solution.

As workers wade through an ever-expanding sea of digital tools, Mountain View, California-based Moveworks is rolling out new AI technology to solve the costly workplace headache of employees hunting for information across scattered business apps.

The enterprise software company, which hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in September and counts Honeywell, Toyota and Broadcom among its customers, is expanding beyond its IT support roots. Its new search tool arrives as businesses increasingly look to trim their growing collection of AI applications while wrestling with information sprawl across collaboration tools, cloud storage and internal wikis.

Moveworks faces competition in the search market. OpenAI introduced SearchGPT Oct. 31, integrating real-time web search into ChatGPT to provide timely, conversational responses. Glean, an AI enterprise search startup, achieved a $4.6 billion valuation, highlighting its growing impact. Elastic’s Search AI Lake also offers real-time, low-latency querying, optimizing data lakes for AI applications.

The RAG Race

While many companies have tried tackling enterprise search using an AI approach called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), the results have been mixed. RAG technology, which combines AI language models with the ability to retrieve specific documents, has gained popularity over the past year as organizations rush to implement generative AI.

But accuracy remains a challenge.

“Traditional RAG systems have two critical shortcomings: accuracy and hallucinations,” Moveworks President and co-founder Varun Singh told PYMNTS. “They are unable to understand and prioritize the trustworthiness of sources, and they can distort information.”

The company’s solution involves “agentic AI,” which is technology that aims to understand queries in a business context, break them down into logical steps and pull information from suitable sources. Beyond locating data, the system attempts to help employees use it.

“It’s not enough to just find information — that’s often just the first step of a task,” Singh said.

The goal is to combine search with the ability to take action, like automating follow-up tasks, he said.

Security and Scale

Security and integration concerns have risen as organizations add more AI tools, particularly for regulated industries handling sensitive data.

“Customers in highly regulated industries like healthcare, defense, financial services, etc., trust us as a wall-to-wall solution because Moveworks adheres to strict permissions and security settings set by each organization,” Singh said.

The system mirrors existing application permissions, meaning employees can only access the information they’re already authorized to see, he said.

The approach includes features to maintain accuracy, such as citation linking for fact-checking and verification. The platform also provides analytics capabilities to help organizations track adoption and use patterns across their various information repositories.

The company’s expansion comes amid growth in the enterprise AI sector, which has seen an explosion of startups and new products since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022.

“Over the past two years, Moveworks’ customer base has doubled, now serving 10% of Fortune 500 employees,” Singh said.

However, challenges remain. Enterprise search has long been a problem that many tech giants have tried and failed to solve. Google’s enterprise search appliance, launched in 2002, was discontinued in 2019 after failing to gain widespread adoption. More recent attempts by established companies and startups have struggled to unify information across the growing number of enterprise applications effectively.

For now, Moveworks is betting that combining search capabilities with task automation will resonate with enterprises drowning in digital tools. As organizations navigate the expanding universe of AI solutions, the company’s approach highlights a growing trend toward consolidated platforms that aim to handle multiple functions while maintaining security and accuracy.

“There’s a huge need for consolidation in the industry,” Singh said. “Gen AI is still seen as somewhat of a risk. Businesses don’t want a bunch of different gen AI solutions floating around their business. They want one, secure solution that can do multiple things well and consistently deliver results.”

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.