It’ll Only Take Five Minutes is Killing Search—It Doesn’t Need To 

It’s no secret in the world of enterprise software that what doesn’t scale doesn’t work. When software doesn’t scale, performance degrades rapidly as usage increases. The catch is knowing when something doesn’t scale and that’s not always immediately obvious. 

The problem here is that individual solutions can scale but when you put enough individual solutions together the combination doesn’t scale. This is jokingly called the “It’ll only take 5 minutes” principle. 

It’ll Only Take Five Minutes 

What is this mysterious “five minutes” principle? If you have one task that will take 5 minutes, that’s fine. It’ll be done quickly, and you can move on. But when you have a dozen such tasks, now it’s an hour used up. Enough of these little things and suddenly you never have time to get anything done. 

This problem makes a dramatic appearance in the world of data.  

The amount of data that companies deal with is growing exponentially. Where once we had small quantities of data, molehills if you will, today we have mountains. And that’s only the beginning. 

In addition to the dramatic increase in the quantity of data, we’ve also seen an explosion in the variety of data. We have financial data in financial applications. We have customer data in CRM systems. We have data in Slack, Teams, email, Confluence, as well as all the meeting transcripts, Word files, spreadsheets, PDFs, and so on. From Atlassian to Zoominfo, the number of interfaces is snowballing.  

While each individual application scales as data increases, the sum total of them does not. Finding information requires remembering where to look, remembering how to look in that specific application, and then grabbing the results before moving on to the next piece of information you need to find. If you don’t find what you’re looking for was that because you’re looking in the wrong location or because you didn’t phrase the query correctly? 

Even if each place you look only takes 5 minutes (if you’re very lucky), you’re still spending a lot of time hunting for data and spending a ton of mental effort in repetitive context switching. Each new application only adds to the cost (currently estimated to be 1-2 hours per day per person). 

Creating information scales. Storing information scales. Searching for information doesn’t scale. Until now. 

Scaling Search With SWIRL 

It would be great if the total time it takes to find information didn’t increase each time you add a new application or new data source. With SWIRL, it doesn’t.  

SWIRL AI Search provides a single, visually elegant interface to simultaneously search all the data sources which you have permission to access. This includes corporate databases as well as your email, Slack channels, local storage, and so on. If you have permission to access it and you want to search it, SWIRL can do it. 

SWIRL connects to 100+ applications, is Zero ETL, and automatically translates your natural language query into the appropriate query format for each data source. In other words, it’s format agnostic, doesn’t move or copy data, and frees you from being forced to remember which variant of SQL (or anything else) a specific source understands.  

SWIRL uses AI to organize and rank the results using a confidence-based relevancy algorithm. SWIRL also provides AI-generated summaries and suggests follow-up questions to help you quickly zero in on the information you need. You choose which AI models SWIRL works with; you are not locked into a specific model or vendor.  

With SWIRL you get speed, security, and accuracy. What’s not to like? 

Better Answers, Less Time 

If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work. For a long time now, search has not been working effectively. Sure, you can eventually find what you’re looking for, but the time required is only increasing. As new specialized data sources and methods—be they applications, databases, or query languages—are developed, the problem gets worse. 

SWIRL AI Search puts an end to the steady creep of lost time and energy. With SWIRL, finding what you need is fast and easy. While we can’t promise that it’ll only take five minutes, SWIRL gets you awfully close.  

Find out how SWIRL can help you find what you need in minutes, not hours. Contact us today for your free demo.