SWIRL Blog

July 22, 2025

Agentic Search—Your Antidote to Tool Chaos

Technology companies love tools. Internal wikis, chat threads, versioned code, scattered docs, ephemeral insights—every system solves a problem, until it becomes one. Then the search begins. Your engineer needs a deployment script. Is it in Notion? Buried in a GitHub gist? Maybe in that shared Drive folder from last quarter? Good luck. Multiply that friction...

December 10, 2024

AI Security in the Enterprise

I worked with a team that was rolling out a state-of-the-art AI tool for customer service. Everyone was thrilled. The system was efficient, automated repetitive tasks, and even reduced response times. But then, just weeks before deployment, a small oversight almost derailed the entire project. An adversarial test revealed that the model could be tricked...

November 27, 2024

Search Box.com with SWIRL

Box is a robust and secure content management platform that is widely adopted and user-friendly. However, if you’ve interacted with Box’s Search API, you might have noticed a limitation: it only returns document titles, not the matching body text. Similarly, the Box web interface, particularly on the free tier, only shows the first matching sentence....

November 19, 2024

Information Overload Wrecks Performance—And How AI Can Help Prevent It

In my article Three Numbers Spell Burnout, I discussed how our information diet went from 10 pages worth of information each day back in 1986 to 150 pages of information today. This article will discuss in more detail why burnout is perhaps the least of our problems when we’re forced to regularly deal with information...

November 18, 2024

The Non-Persistence of Memory—Using AI to Manage Information Overload

Memory is the first thing to go. I can’t recall what comes next (source forgotten). As our information diet accelerates from 10 to 50 to 150 pages per day and counting (Three Numbers Spell Burnout and Information Overload Wrecks Performance), it will come as no surprise that information overload also interferes with learning and memory—if...

November 14, 2024

Transforming Data-Driven Decision Making with AI and SWIRL

What is Data-Driven Decision Making? Data-driven decision-making involves analyzing data to guide strategic business decisions, eliminating guesswork, and relying instead on patterns, trends, and insights. By leveraging data analysis and predictive analytics, data-driven decision-making ensures that organizations make informed choices that align with their goals. This approach is grounded in objective insights from vast data...

November 14, 2024

SWIRL v3.9 Community Release

The SWIRL team is thrilled to release the SWIRL AI Connect 3.9, Community Edition, a significant upgrade that enhances functionality, user experience, and compatibility. This release is especially relevant to AI search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) users, with critical new features, refined improvements, and extended support for Python 3.12.6. Below is an overview of the...

November 12, 2024

Reassessing Knowledge Worker Productivity in the Age of AI and Private Data

When I wrote the article, “Reality Check: Still Spending More Time Gathering Instead Of Analyzing,” in 2019, we had high hopes for the impact of technology on productivity. Cloud computing, ubiquitous connectivity, and the onset of what was then just emerging AI seemed poised to shift the data landscape dramatically. But even with these tools,...

November 8, 2024

It Really Is Possible to Save Time With AI

Tools are labor saving devices. From washing machines, dishwashers, stoves, calculators, computers, and, of course, coffee makers, we’re surrounded by gadgets whose function in our lives is to make it easier for us to get things done quickly, easily, and more effectively. Some of these tools replace annoying or difficult physical labor (ever wash clothes...

November 4, 2024

SWIRL + ServiceNow: Get Answers, Not Another Hunt

You’ve got questions—like “How do I configure VPN on my Mac?” or “How do I order a mobile device?” But the answers might be spread across ServiceNow, Teams, or somewhere on the web. What you need is one search that delivers exactly what you’re looking for, not a scavenger hunt through dozens of systems. That’s...