Cohesity has announced the launch of Cohesity Gaia, the industry's first retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI and large language models (LLMs) powered enterprise search assistant. This innovative tool, set to be released on 15th March, allows users to ask questions and receive instant results by accessing and analysing their organization's backup data. In collaboration with the Cohesity Data Cloud, these AI features can help organisations meet their objectives while maintaining data security and compliance.

Cohesity has declared partnerships with the three leading public cloud providers to integrate their LLM services into Cohesity Gaia. The underlying architecture of the Cohesity Data Cloud offers a unique blend of performance, extensibility and scale, and Cohesity Gaia expands upon these benefits. By implementing a RAG AI solution on Cohesity's multi-cloud platform, the company can provide RAG AI conversational search experiences across cloud and hybrid environments, thus aiding organisations in gaining deeper insights into their data for future decision making.

Cohesity commits to maintaining a fully indexed database encompassing all files, workloads, and points in time, thereby supporting the creation of AI-ready indexes to enable rapid search responses, offering precise and fast results. Initially, the AI assistant will support Microsoft 365 and OneDrive data, and plan to expand to other workloads in future.

Unlike traditional search engines, Cohesity Gaia doesn't merely retrieve data. As Greg Statton, Office of the CTO – Data & AI, Cohesity, explained, “With Cohesity Gaia, you simply ask, 'Why have costs increased in the region?', and Cohesity Gaia will pull the relevant data from your stored data, analyse it, and return an answer to your question. It’s that simple.”

Russ Fellows, Vice President at The Futurum Group Labs, underlined the pioneering nature of Gaia: “Cohesity is the first data security and management vendor bringing the power of AI search to enterprises with the Cohesity Gaia AI search assistant. Gaia enables companies to quickly leverage their existing stored data with the power of generative AI while preserving data security and compliance."

An impressive list of potential applications for Cohesity Gaia includes assessing cyber resilience, conducting financial and compliance audit checks, answering complex legal questions, and serving as a knowledge base to train new employees. Cohesity CEO and President, Sanjay Poonen, stated that "with Cohesity Gaia, for the first time in our industry, companies will be able to leverage generative AI to query their data in a virtually seamless way."

In JSR Corporation, Gaia already has a keen early adopter. The international materials research and manufacturing company is excited about the potential of using generative AI to quickly discover relevant work across their diverse research centres. Ryan Reed, head of IT at JSR Corporation, highlighted how "Cohesity Gaia allows us to query our rich store of research data and quickly find relevant work. It will also allow our researchers to use their native language to query the system. This could prove incredibly valuable in accelerating the rate of our research and discovery.”