Gartner® Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search

What Is Enterprise AI Search?

Enterprise AI Search is a new market category that Gartner defines as AI-powered platforms that enable employees to find, surface, and act on information distributed across an organization’s enterprise content systems — using a combination of semantic search, natural language processing, generative AI, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to deliver contextual, answer-first experiences rather than traditional lists of documents. This distinction from legacy enterprise search is fundamental. Traditional enterprise search retrieves and ranks documents based on keyword relevance. Enterprise AI Search goes further across three dimensions:

• Understanding intent, not just keywords. Enterprise AI Search platforms use large language models and semantic understanding to interpret what a user is actually trying to accomplish — not just the words they typed — and surface information that answers their underlying need, even when it doesn’t match their exact phrasing.
• Generating grounded answers, not just results. Through RAG architectures, enterprise AI search platforms retrieve relevant content from verified internal sources and synthesize it into direct, natural-language answers — with citations and source attribution that allow users to verify the response. This is what separates enterprise-grade AI search from consumer AI tools: the answer is grounded in the organization’s own knowledge, not in an LLM’s training data.
• Acting across systems, not just finding content. The most advanced enterprise AI search platforms integrate with agentic AI capabilities — enabling not just discovery but action: triggering workflows, populating forms, escalating issues, or initiating downstream processes based on what the AI finds.

What Does It Mean to Be a Gartner® Market Guide Representative Vendor?

Being named a Representative Vendor in a Gartner Market Guide means Gartner’s analysts have independently identified your platform as relevant and noteworthy within the market being defined. It is not a ranking — the Market Guide format does not place vendors on a competitive grid — but it is a meaningful independent validation that the vendor meets Gartner’s criteria for inclusion in the market’s primary reference document.

For an inaugural Market Guide — the first time Gartner has ever defined a category — inclusion as a Representative Vendor carries particular significance. It means Sinequa was identified by Gartner’s analysts as one of the vendors actively shaping the definition of what enterprise AI search is and should be, at the moment the market is being formally recognized.

For enterprise technology buyers, Representative Vendor status in a Gartner Market Guide is a practical shortlisting signal: these are the vendors Gartner considers worth evaluating as you build your enterprise AI search strategy.

What the Gartner® Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search Covers

The September 2025 Market Guide provides enterprise technology leaders with a comprehensive orientation to the enterprise AI search market. Key areas covered in the report include:

• Market Definition and Scope. Gartner establishes the boundaries of the Enterprise AI Search market — what capabilities define it, how it differs from adjacent categories (enterprise search, insight engines, conversational AI platforms), and what problem it solves for organizations.
• Market Direction and Trends. The report outlines where the enterprise AI search market is heading — including the convergence of search, RAG, and agentic AI; the shift toward multimodal enterprise search; and the growing importance of governance and data grounding as organizations scale AI deployments.
• Representative Vendor Profiles. Gartner identifies and profiles the vendors it considers most relevant to the enterprise AI search market — including their primary capabilities, deployment models, and target use cases. Sinequa by ChapsVision is included in this section.
• Evaluation Criteria for Technology Buyers. The report provides practical guidance for enterprise buyers evaluating platforms — including the key capability areas to assess, the deployment and integration questions to ask, and the governance and security considerations that differentiate enterprise-grade platforms from general-purpose AI tools.
• Strategic Planning Assumptions. Gartner provides forward-looking assumptions about enterprise AI search adoption rates, the evolution of key capabilities, and the market consolidation expected as the category matures.

Why Sinequa Was Recognized in the Gartner® Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search

Sinequa by ChapsVision’s inclusion as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search reflects a platform built specifically for the demands of enterprise AI search at scale — not a repurposed consumer AI tool or a point solution bolted onto an existing search engine.

Sinequa’s enterprise AI search platform is architected around five capabilities that Gartner identifies as central to the enterprise AI search market:

• Universal connectivity. Sinequa connects to over 200 enterprise content sources — SharePoint, Salesforce, Workday, SAP, Teamcenter, Confluence, ServiceNow, and dozens more — through a pre-built connector ecosystem. This means enterprise AI search operates across the full breadth of an organization’s knowledge, not just the content that has been migrated to a single system.
• Hybrid retrieval architecture. Sinequa combines neural semantic search, keyword search, and structured data retrieval in a single unified pipeline — delivering the precision of traditional enterprise search with the contextual understanding of AI-powered semantic models. This hybrid approach consistently outperforms pure-vector or pure-keyword search on enterprise content.
• RAG-powered AI assistants. Sinequa’s retrieval-augmented generation layer grounds every AI-generated answer in verified enterprise content — with source citations, access control enforcement, and full auditability. This is the critical enterprise-grade differentiator: AI answers that can be traced, verified, and trusted.
• Enterprise AI agents. Beyond search and Q&A, Sinequa’s agentic AI framework enables autonomous multi-step workflows — from automated research and report generation to maintenance diagnostics and compliance monitoring — extending enterprise AI search from a discovery tool into an action-capable platform.
• Security and governance by design. Sinequa’s platform enforces existing access controls from connected systems at query time — ensuring that AI-generated answers never surface content the requesting user is not authorized to see. For regulated industries and IP-sensitive environments, this is non-negotiable.

Sinequa is deployed today across life sciences, manufacturing, financial services, energy, aerospace and defense, and legal — industries where information accuracy, security, and scalability are strategic requirements, not nice-to-haves.

Gartner® Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search. By: Tim Nelms, Stephen Emmott, Jed Cawthorne, Darin Stewart. 15 September 2025

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This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Sinequa.