Over the last decade, despite the explosion in data coming online across industries, enterprise search has been an area with limited technological innovation. Many of the products companies have used, leverage algorithms, such as BM25 or TF-IDF, that are more than 20 years old. Additionally most enterprises, despite their diverse needs, have relied on one-size-fits-all search products. The result? A search experience that often feels outdated, generic and detached from both the user’s and organization’s particular objectives.
Enter Objective, Inc.* – a multi-modal, AI-driven and outcome-oriented enterprise search platform. Objective’s vision isn’t just about smarter search; it’s about creating a tailored search experience that understands and adapts to the unique needs and goals of each business and user.
Addressing the Inherent Challenges in Traditional Search
Search, in its essence, is a bridge connecting users to relevant content. But, developing and sustaining a proficient search system is more complicated than it seems. Traditional search mechanisms are rigid, needing continuous manual interventions and code deployments to align search results with the North-Star metrics of a business.
Pablo Mendes, Objective’s Co-Founder and CEO, rightly highlights that the paradigm is shifting, “In the age of AI, we can finally cut our losses. Search systems can teach themselves how to impact the business by figuring out what results should be shown to a given user for a given search term. This is what the 1% of the most sophisticated technology companies are working on today, but with consumer expectations changing as a result of AI, it needs to be part of every website and application.”
Here’s why we invested in Objective:
Seasoned leadership: Objective was founded in September 2021 by Pablo Mendes, Joachim Daiber, and Lance Hasson. When we first met Pablo, Joachim, and Lance, we were taken aback by their deep expertise and vision for how enterprise search could drive operational goals. Pablo, Joachim, and Lance have a history of pushing the boundaries of Information Retrieval rooted in foundational research, building at the forefront in cutting-edge startups and driving innovation at large technology companies. Pablo and Joachim have worked together for a decade building out core product at Lattice, acquired by Apple in 2017, deriving insights from the unstructured data within large enterprises. Additionally, Pablo, Joachim, and Lance built AI-search algorithms and infrastructure at Apple where they witnessed first-hand both the immense value in these technologies and the challenges associated with delivering the next-generation of reliable, scalable search.
Simplicity in Multimodal Search Stack: Objective’s magic is under-the-hood, innovating both in algorithms and architecture to provide an unparalleled search experience. Objective’s Search API includes numerous infrastructure-level and AI modeling components needed for building scalable and performant multimodal search, such as load-balancing, continual AI model finetuning, and customizable relevance objectives, which can prevent even the largest and most sophisticated companies from building and deploying proprietary solutions.
This streamlined process can empower companies across a wide range of verticals. For instance, The Information, a leading tech-focused news outlet, uses Objective to drive reader engagement while commerce startups, like Pod Foods, use Objective to offer top-notch search experiences.
Redefining User Experience: We’re witnessing the end of an era of traditional search engines. The rise of new AI interfaces, like ChatGPT, have changed user expectations in search experiences. We are starting to see an evolution from the dominant keywords-driven business model to that of conversational interfaces incorporating rich media. The next-generation of enterprise search will emerge with new interaction modalities that move beyond basic prompt-answer formats and combine the best of multimodal UI with data–layering across text, image, voice, and video. We believe Objective will enable this paradigm shift in search UX, evidenced by their ability to reason at scale across many data types and knack for designing thoughtful search interactions aligned to business outcomes.
Automated Search Data Prep: Manual data tagging is outdated and, frankly, inefficient. Platforms like Dribbble, which house creative content generated by a multitude of contributors, utilize Objective’s search capabilities to eliminate the burden and inconsistency associated with metadata tagging. The ability to use AI for data tagging is one that will improve search relevancy and drive operational efficiency for a wide array of use cases across enterprises.
Objective Search is available today. Visit https://objective.inc to schedule a demo.
