What's Ahead for Enterprise Search in 2016?

As 2015 comes to a close enterprises are looking forward to what 2016 has to offer in the big data and knowledge management space. Laurent Simoneau, Coveo president and CTO, recently shared key trends and technologies that he says will shape what’s to come in the year ahead.  “We believe that 2016 will be a year in which a lot of very advanced technologies will become available to the masses of enterprises,” Simoneau said. “This is possible because of cloud, which allows these very complex workloads to be run ‘under the hood.’”

According to Simoneau:

1. Machine Learning Will Transform Enterprise Search into Intelligent Search: Search results will evolve from matching keywords to matching the intent of the user.  “It does that by analyzing regularly all of the actives on a given website, the click stream, and other users’ behavior and recycles that automatically into your own search process,” Simoneau said. “Think of what Amazon does on their website and think of what Google does on the web. This becomes available to organizations in their own enterprise search projects.”
2. Advancements in Cyber Security Will Benefit Search Options: “Because of the cloud, we are able to provide very advanced security for enterprise search,” Simoneau said.  More companies will unify their cloud and on-premise content from across all of their systems due to variety of options and upgraded safeguards. This will enable organizations to extend enterprise search across all systems, including data silos, and give every employee and every customer the best, most far-reaching and most relevant information at every point. “We have things like encryption at rest, you’re always running the latest and greatest versions of every component in your cloud infrastructure, you have centralized monitoring, and high availability,” Simoneau said. “This allows you to have a great answer to cyber security threats around your enterprise search projects.”
3. Real-Time Information Will be More Accessible than Ever:  In 2016, enterprise search technologies will give everyone the information they need, when they need it, because it will understand what has helped “others like me” to succeed. “If we know who is looking at the content, we can very quickly understand in real-time what ‘others like me’ are interested in given the context and either provide recommendations as content, as search results, or recommendations as ‘you should click here or you should try this’,” Simoneau said. “Because of machine learning this will always be up to date, fresh, and contextual.”
4. Recommendations Will Get Smarter: Proactive search will show people what is related to their current needs while predictive search will recommend what the individual doesn’t even know they need, but will find important. “You have predictive features that become available and you have the ability to get content from multiple silos and make it available within those systems,” Simoneau said. “That’s why we claim those systems become more intelligent.”
5. Search Will Change the Digital Workplace:  Search will make systems smart by delivering the best information, every time, Simoneau noted. “I think all of this needs to be simple to enable, maintain and use,” Simoneau said. “You want to have this Amazon- or Google-like experience without having an army to maintain it. We want to make this available to as many organizations as possible.”