Actian Explained #9 – Context is Key: Searching Data in the AI Era

In Actian, we are materializing a vision. It's a vision of searching data in the AI era, and it's a vision that depends on context. For decades, it was an uphill battle to search, find, and use enterprise data.

Then, ideas of search engines for data emerged. That architecture was a metadata knowledge graph, and it was the first step to make it easy to search for enterprise data with simple search keywords. However, we are in the midst of an AI revolution that has expanded our possibilities for enterprise search.

And in Actian, we have asked ourselves what does searching enterprise data in the AI era look like at its very best? Actian is not only asking the question, we are also delivering the answer. We are materializing contextual search in the Actian Data Intelligence Platform.

We want enterprises, both humans and AI agents, to be able to search, find, and use data safely, smoothly. Here's how. Data is contextual.

Data is inscribed in a contextual reality. This context is very concrete. Data stems from actions, and data is the trace that is left of those actions.

Someone bought something, checked in at a hotel, reacted on social media, walked through a secured door. But in the past, far too often, all we had in an enterprise setting was the data itself, the transfer of money, the arrival time, the reaction, the door opening, the data itself, but not the context of the data. We had a hard time answering why these actions took place, what the people performing them were trying to obtain, who they were, and how their actions were received.

In short, far too often we had the data, but we didn't know the context of the data. That context took time to establish, and it was hard to perfection. It made it hard to search for data, to find data, to understand data, and to use data.

Now, the situation is different. Actian is making it possible to search data with context through AI. Under the hood, our newly developed semantic technologies harness the enterprise context contained in unstructured data at enterprise scale, so that you can search data without friction, thanks to a well-crafted semantic layer.

You could already search with a set of simple words and find relevant data assets and products, but your capabilities have now expanded. You can also search in natural language for data contained in a deeper, more multifaceted context. You can engage in a conversational search about the data that you are searching for, negotiating smoothly what should be left out or included or tweaked.

You can even connect your search to an even bigger set of data sources through Model Context Protocol. Once you have searched for your data at the metadata level, you can keep searching in it in natural language through the Actian AI Analyst. Analytical questions can now be asked as they are thought in natural language.

Through our unique new technology with unparalleled precision, we translate your questions from natural language to SQL and back again. And now imagine the following. You can orchestrate agentic architectures to do all this so AI agents can continuously search, refine, analyze, and act on contextualized enterprise data at scale.

Actian wants to deliver unparalleled search capabilities to your enterprise. We know that when you are searching for data in the AI era, context is key.