End Cognitive Overload At Workplace With Unified Search

Data scavenger hunt

Knowledge workers have access to more data than ever. Yet answering even a simple question can turn into a data scavenger hunt that consumes days or weeks of valuable time.

What data do I have?

Where is it?

How do I find it?

Relevant data might be stored in traditional databases, in Confluence, Slack, email, Webex, or scattered across countless other platforms. Finding that information is slow, tedious, and nightmarish at best.

Searching through months of Slack conversations and digging through years’ worth of Confluence pages produces a deluge of hits, each of which needs to be carefully examined to see if it is the right information.

That doesn’t include all the other data sources that employees might have access to but not know about or how to access.

Searching for data can easily add up to 2 hours or more per day per person of wasted time. The cost to business productivity is easily in the millions of dollars—and that’s not counting the cost of making wrong decisions based on old or inaccurate data, delays in completing projects, the damage to employee morale, and increasing cognitive overload.

What is cognitive overload?

Cognitive overload occurs when the brain is overwhelmed by excess information or demands, making it difficult to process and remember new information. This state can lead to feelings of stress, decreased productivity, and impaired decision-making. Common causes include multitasking, complex tasks, and lack of organization of data or interruptions at work due to multiple reasons.

Cognitive overload due to scattered information

Cognitive overload due to scattered information in the workplace occurs when employees have to sift through disorganized and fragmented data across various platforms and tools. This can lead to increased stress, decreased productivity, and impaired decision-making. The constant need to switch between multiple apps, emails, and documents to find relevant information can overwhelm working memory, making it difficult to focus and prioritize tasks.

To mitigate this, organizations should implement centralized knowledge hubs and collaborative tools that streamline information access and reduce employees’ cognitive load.

You can also use AI to solve the problem if you don’t mind loading all of your data into someone else’s cloud, with all the time, costs, and security risks that entails.

Fortunately, there is an alternative: instead of bringing your data to the AI, Swirl’s powerful AI Connect Software brings the AI to your data, accelerating data access and providing users with a “single pane of glass” visibility into the data they need.

Bring the AI to your data

With the release of ChatGPT 4 on March 14, 2023 (aka PI Day), astute business executives quickly saw an opportunity to unlock previously unimaginable productivity levels. The ability to ask ChatGPT any question and get a useful answer appeared to have the potential to accelerate data availability and data literacy sharply.

The reality, however, turned out to be more complicated.

Company data needs to be private and secure. In a world where data breaches are all too common, uploading company data to third-party AI vendors presents an unacceptable risk. Companies swiftly adopted an “AI Inside” policy to mitigate the risks.

Swirl makes the AI Inside policy work. Swirl AI Connect enables modern enterprises to leverage AI securely to unlock their data and dramatically boost productivity.

Swirl AI Connect allows you to use any approved AI LLM to talk to virtually any data store, giving you access to all of your data—including data you didn’t know about (provided you are authorized to access it). Swirl follows a zero-trust security model, eliminating the need for data migration and instead enabling AI systems to connect directly with source systems safely within the corporate firewall. Data remains secure in your data repositories.

Grounding results in facts

AI summaries are becoming a standard part of search results—but that doesn’t mean they can be trusted (https://www.techlicious.com/blog/can-you-trust-google-search-ai-overview/). Swirl’s innovative use of Retrieval Augmented Generation results in facts, reducing or eliminating the risk of AI hallucinations and errors. Swirl organizes results by relevancy to the original query, providing results you can use—and trust.

Employees get the data they need when needed, and the business reaps the benefits of using AI for information location and retrieval without the risk of turning corporate data over to a third party.

Benefits

Swirl technology provides several key benefits:

• Data stays in place: Swirl AI Connect enables Generative AI to connect with source systems, bringing the AI to the data.
• Unified search: Swirl AI Connect searches multiple data and content repositories simultaneously.
• Adopts existing security: Swirl AI Connect utilizes the source system security policies following a zero-trust security approach to ensure users access only what they’re allowed.
• AI flexibility: Swirl AI Connect supports using multiple LLMs and AIs, including company-created models located behind the firewall.
• Data flexibility: Swirl AI Connect supports structured data from databases, as well as content from email, office documents, collaboration tools such as Teams and Slack, and more.
• Pilot to co-pilot: Swirl AI Connect enables simultaneous communication with multiple co-pilots.

By bringing AI to the data and providing a flexible, scalable platform for AI deployment, Swirl enables organizations to unlock their full potential and drive unprecedented levels of productivity and innovation. No longer do employees need to spend days or weeks wondering what data they have, where it is located, or how to access it.

The era of the scavenger hunt is over.

Find out how your organization can benefit from ending the data scavenger hunt. Contact Swirl today.