How can leaders use AI to transform their organisations and drive change? The answer lies in context and delivering context begins with search.
By bringing the right data together at the right time, AI can generate context-specific material to drive organisational growth, innovation and efficiency. As Australian organisations look to harness the power of AI, techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and vector search are proving to be game-changers in shaping the next phase of AI evolution.
With ElasticON Sydney just around the corner, developers, IT leaders, and AI enthusiasts have a prime opportunity to explore how these advanced search and analytics technologies can supercharge their AI initiatives.
Gen AI transforms Australian business landscape
What’s behind the shift? Generative AI (Gen AI) is poised to transform how Australian businesses operate, revolutionising industries by automating content creation, improving customer interactions, and streamlining workflows.
In fact, Australian businesses are increasingly leveraging these technologies to improve decision-making and create personalised experiences at scale.
According to the Elastic Generative AI Report, nearly all IT decision-makers in Australia—a staggering 99%—acknowledge the transformative impact of Gen AI on their organisations. Looking ahead, 74% of businesses plan to increase their investments in Gen AI within the next two to three years, demonstrating the widespread confidence in its potential.
Additionally, more than half of IT leaders, 53%, believe that search-powered Gen AI could save employees at least two days per week, significantly boosting productivity. Despite ongoing concerns over a skills gap, almost 40% of respondents see Gen AI as a valuable tool for upskilling and educating employees.
These findings highlight that Gen AI isn’t just a futuristic concept—it’s a key driver of business success today. However, for Gen AI to reach its full potential, businesses need robust search capabilities that ensure accuracy, relevance, and efficiency.
Smart AI starts with smarter search capabilities
Certainly, the true strength of Gen AI lies in its ability to access and process vast amounts of data with precision.
But what makes this possible? Vector search and RAG play a crucial role.
For starters, RAG is a technique that lets large language models (LLMs) reference knowledge bases outside its training data sources before generating a response. With RAG, LLMs can access relevant information in real-time to produce accurate and contextual responses.
Meanwhile, vector search enhances traditional search by using learned vector representations, enabling semantic search capabilities and unlocking the full potential of unstructured data for AI applications. Semantic search improves search result quality as it interprets natural language more accurately and in context as opposed to search results that match words in the query without any context.
In fact, Elastic’s implementation of RAG and vector search is redefining AI-driven transformation, fast-tracking the creation of user experiences, from personalised recommendations to advanced natural language processing (NLP) systems.
Its RAG model, for instance, stands out for being cost-effective, reducing computing and storage demands while enhancing the accuracy and personalisation of AI responses. Essentially, it can craft answers that are more personalised and accurate by combining the latest, most up-to-date facts and relevant information.
With these advancements, developers can integrate Elastic’s search capabilities with LLMs to build AI solutions that drive business innovation across industries such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce.
Customer successes
Real-world applications highlight the impact of these technologies, and companies are already seeing tangible benefits.
Consensus, for example, used RAG to boost search accuracy by 30% while cutting latency by 75%. Consensus transformed academic research for a million users with a new version of its search platform with advanced semantic and text search from Elastic.
“Elastic is a huge differentiator in our space. We’re not just a thin AI wrapper on top of someone else’s data, we own the search engine and we’re adding AI features on top of that,” according to Consensus co-founder and CPO, Christian Salem.
Meanwhile, industry leader LG CNS has significantly increased the search accuracy of its KeyLook AI search algorithm from 75% to 95% using Elastic’s hybrid search which comprises full-text, vector, and semantic search capabilities. This increase in speed and accuracy has let employees find documents and files containing the desired information much more quickly.
ElasticON Sydney: Essential insights for IT leaders
Today’s IT leaders are looking for guidance on how AI-driven search can revolutionise their organisations, and how peers are leveraging Elastic’s platform to unlock the full potential of their data.
For organisations keen on staying ahead in the AI revolution, ElasticON Sydney on March 6, 2025, is the must-attend event.
ElasticON gathers developers, IT professionals, DevOps engineers, and SOC analysts for an in-depth look at the future of Search AI and its practical applications in driving AI-powered transformation.
What to expect at ElasticON Sydney:
- Hands-on insights from industry leaders and AI pioneers.
- Live demonstrations showcasing how businesses are leveraging Elastic’s AI-driven search technologies.
- Networking opportunities with experts shaping the future of AI and search.
- Strategies to harness the power of data through advanced search and analytics solutions.
As businesses across Australia look to integrate AI-driven solutions, ElasticON Sydney is the perfect place to explore how the precision of search combined with AI intelligence can supercharge organisational evolution.
Register now on elastic.co/events/elasticon/sydney