In my 20+ years in the tech field, I've witnessed the same challenge across every organization I've worked with: teams drowning in an ocean of tools, systems, and data. No matter how advanced the tech stack or talented the team, people spend countless hours reconciling updates instead of driving progress. The cost isn't just time, it's momentum, deals, revenue, and everything else that moves a business forward.
My Experience with Enterprise Search Solutions
Early in my career, I watched companies struggle with this information chaos until pioneers like Glean emerged with enterprise search solutions. They made it possible for teams to finally locate the right files, messages, and knowledge buried across disparate systems, essentially creating an internal Google for companies. It was a breakthrough that solved the first half of the problem: finding stuff.
But even after implementing these powerful search tools, I continued to face a fundamental limitation. Finding information proved to be only half the battle. My teams were still constantly reacting ,putting out fires, connecting dots after the fact, always one step behind. We could locate the needle in the haystack, but we still had to figure out what it meant, why it mattered, and what to do about it.
The Missing Piece: From Search to Context
Through years of grappling with this gap, I realized the missing piece wasn't better search, it was intelligent context. We needed something that didn't just help us find information when we looked for it, but understood what mattered most and surfaced it proactively. Something that could cut through the noise, connect the dots automatically, and help us stay ahead of issues instead of chasing them.
That realization led us to build Jigso. Where search tools help you react to what you're looking for, Jigso helps you understand what you should be paying attention to,before you even know to look for it.
What This Article Covers
In this article, I'll unpack how enterprise search compares with contextual intelligence platforms like Jigso, and explore why more companies are discovering that search alone isn't enough, as context is what truly drives performance in the modern business environment.
What Is Enterprise Search? A Smarter Way to Search
For the uninitiated, enterprise search software is a tool that allows users to search, access, and retrieve information from across multiple data sources, both internal and external, in one centralized interface. Companies like Glean and Unleash create platforms that essentially function as an internal Google for companies. From my experience implementing these systems, they excel at their core purpose: making enterprise information discoverable.
The Real Challenge: When You Don't Know What You Don't Know
But here's where enterprise search hits its architectural ceiling in production environments. The biggest problems in business aren't the ones you can query for, they're the ones you don't even know exist yet.
Think about it from a systems perspective: When was the last time a critical business issue announced itself with a searchable keyword? Customer churn doesn't manifest as "search: why is client X unhappy." Pipeline risks don't surface when you query "deals about to fall through." Competitive threats don't appear in your search results for "market shifts emerging."
The most valuable business intelligence lives in the correlations between data points, in behavioral patterns across integrated systems, in the contextual relationships that only become apparent through continuous monitoring and analysis. That's not a search problem, that's a distributed intelligence problem. And it requires a fundamentally different technical architecture.
What Is Jigso? Contextual Intelligence for GTM Teams
Recognizing these fundamental limitations, we engineered Jigso as an active intelligence layer that works both proactively and on-demand across your entire tech stack. We're talking full integration: CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce), database and analytics tools (Databricks, Qlik), communication platforms (Slack, Teams), and project management systems (ClickUp, Monday).
But here's the key architectural difference: traditional search systems are stateless they respond to queries and forget. Jigso maintains persistent context across all your business processes, building what we call a "living knowledge graph" that evolves with your organization.
This means:
What we've built isn't search infrastructure, it's organizational intelligence infrastructure. The difference between reactive information retrieval and proactive business intelligence is the difference between playing defense and playing offense in today's market.
What's Best for You?
From my years of implementing these types of solutions, here's how I'd recommend thinking about the choice:
Choose enterprise search if you're focused on solving today's information retrieval challenges. Your team spends too much time searching across systems, and you need a proven, secure solution that's widely reviewed on Gartner and Software Advice. It's an excellent foundation for improving how your team accesses information.
Choose Jigso if you're thinking strategically about where your business needs to be in the next few years. This isn't just about finding information faster, it's about building the kind of intelligent, proactive organization that stays ahead of issues rather than chasing them. In my experience, this is how forward-thinking companies create sustainable competitive advantages ,turning scattered work and disconnected tools into clarity, focus, and measurable impact.
In other words: enterprise search optimizes how you work today. Contextual intelligence transforms how you'll compete tomorrow.
