App Switching Is A Silent Productivity Killer. Guru’s Enterprise Search Is Solving It–with Help From AI

Tuesday, 26 March 2024, 6:07 pm
Press Release: Hugh Grant

“We have vast amounts of data in disparate sources.”

These are the words of Oracle’s CIO, Jae Evans, who recently told CIO.com that solving this problem is their number one priority in 2024.

The chances are, your company can relate.

Organizations today use an eye-watering 371 SaaS apps on average. That’s 371 different digital locations where valuable information can live.

While having a large number of apps is not a bad thing in and of itself, it can create problems. Namely: information silos.

And when a company has a lot of information silos, employees have to switch between those silos every time they need to find what they’re looking for. Then they have to search within that silo. And if they’re lucky enough to unearth the information they need, they then have to return to their original task and pick up where they left off.

It’s a highly inefficient process that employees go through multiple times a day–just to find the information they need to do their job.

At a time when companies are focusing intensely on optimizing costs and increasing productivity, this problem has never been more important to solve. But at the same time, it has never been easier to solve–thanks to the emergence of a new breed of AI-powered enterprise search products like Guru.

Guru is an enterprise search platform that allows employees to search across all their company’s apps, chats, and docs, and get instant answers they can trust.

And unlike any other enterprise search product, Guru lets users search across their company’s silos directly from within whatever app they’re working in.

It lives where you work. It places the information you need at your fingertips. And it eliminates one of the biggest causes of inefficiency at companies today: context switching.

The silent productivity killer: context switching

When an employee has a question, the first thing they’re likely to do is try to find the answer by themselves. They’ll stop working on their current task, open up a new tab or app, and start searching. But before they’ve even begun their search, their productivity has taken a hit.

Research from UC Irvine found that it takes a person 23 minutes to regain focus after being distracted. So, the mere task of switching from one app to another delivers a blow to an employee’s efficiency.

From there, it only gets worse.

Once an employee has opened up a new app, their next task is to actually find what they’re looking for. While many of the world’s most popular SaaS products–from CRMs to wikis to file storage systems–have many strengths, search functionality is rarely one of them.

So when the employee realizes they can’t find an answer to their question, their next step will be to send a message to a colleague. Now that colleague has been distracted, too. That’s 23 minutes lost for them as well.

Context switching is a by-product of app overload and information silos that plague companies today. And it’s a silent productivity killer that hits every employee and wreaks havoc on a company’s ability to operate efficiently.

That’s why Guru’s enterprise search product doesn’t only make it easy for employees to find the information they need, it makes it possible for them to do so without ever having to switch contexts.

Here’s how it works.

The only enterprise search product that lives where you work

When an employee needs to find a piece of information, they can simply ask Guru a question and get an instant answer in plain language alongside a list of the sources used to generate that answer.

Guru connects to all of the world’s most popular apps, including the likes of Box, Confluence, Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, SharePoint, Slack, and Zendesk. So whether a company stores a lot of information in a CRM, file storage system, wiki, or any other SaaS app, they can easily unlock access to that information for all employees.

Every answer that Guru generates is based on each employee’s role, seniority, location, and previous work, ensuring that everyone gets a personalized experience and only sees information they have permission to see. And when an employee wants to share an answer with others, they can use Guru’s wiki and employee intranet capabilities to quickly capture it and make it available to the rest of their team.

With the ability to search across all their company’s apps, Guru users can significantly increase their efficiency. And with the added ability to do so without leaving the app they’re in, that efficiency gain is accelerated.

For example, imagine you’re a sales leader who’s drafting an email to a late-stage prospect after a great demo call. You need to include contact details that are stored in your CRM, product details that are stored in your knowledge base, and pricing information that’s stored in your wiki. With Guru, you could pull all three pieces of information from those three separate apps without leaving your email client.

In this scenario, the sales leader can not only easily find the information they need to write an excellent closing email, they can do so instantly–without having to switch between different information silos.

Driving operational efficiency with AI

App overload has become an increasingly common challenge for companies as tech stacks become more complex. And amid this complexity, information silos can proliferate and lead to context switching, a lack of access to trusted information, and widespread inefficiency.

But with the emergence of generative AI and a new wave of enterprise search products, it is now easier than ever to solve this issue once and for all. Thousands of companies across multiple industries are using Guru to give their employees the ability to search across all their apps to find the information they need–directly from whatever app they’re working in.

This article opened with a quote from one accomplished CIO, so let’s finish with a quote from another. Ahmed Fessi, chief transformation and information officer at Medius, recently said that “a top priority in 2024 should be using AI to drive business innovation and efficiency.” With enterprise search solutions that live where employees work, we’re already seeing the dramatic impact on efficiency that AI is having.

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