You.com launches a 'professional-grade' research agent for enterprises

OpenAI, Google, and others have already released AI research agents. Now, You.com hopes to raise the ante with what the company calls “the world’s first professional-grade research agent for business.” 

Advanced Research & Insights agent

On Thursday, You.com launched its Advanced Research & Insights (ARI) agent, which can simultaneously analyze up to 400 sources and output a comprehensive report with verifiable sources and interactive graphs, charts, and visualizations in five minutes, according to the press release. The number of sources ARI can analyze will continue to grow as the technology scales. 

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The feature is meant to deliver enterprises with “professional-grade” reports across different research-intensive industries. You.com says ARI functions as a management consultant, saving companies money in the long run. The tool potentially places a deep research assistant in the hands of all working professionals in an organization. 

Like the other research agents on the market, ARI shows its chain of thought reasoning, which is its thought process, before outputting conclusions. 

“ARI’s breakthrough is its ability to maintain contextual understanding while processing hundreds of sources simultaneously,” said Bryan McCann, co-founder and CTO of You.com. “When combined with chain-of-thought reasoning and extended test-time compute, ARI is able to discover and incorporate adjacent research areas dynamically as analysis progresses.”

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ARI builds on the company’s Research Agent experience, which is accessible to everyone and can analyze 200 sources. You.com suggested what sets ARI apart from competitors is the magnitude of its analysis, as it synthesizes hundreds of sources simultaneously into a report, as opposed to the 30 to 40 sources typically processed sequentially by competitors, and its speed, as ARI takes just five minutes. 

OpenAI discloses that its Deep Research feature searches through “hundreds” of sources in five to 30 minutes, while Google Gemini’s Deep Research feature does not specify how many sources it synthesizes but does say the process takes from five to 10 minutes. 

Hands-on 

I had the opportunity to test ARI, and the experience was pretty fascinating. I used the prompt: “What does research show about fasting before working out? Give me a complete report with Pros and Cons.”

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I timed the experience. Three minutes passed from entering the prompt to receiving my answer. The fascinating part? During that time, ARI looked at 329 sources, which I could see in real-time as it sifted web pages. 

The report was robust, with eight sections filled with subsections addressing different aspects of fasting before workouts. Each point in the report had a footnote. The report even included a table that compared Intermittent Fasting to Time-Restricting Feeding, two terms ARI found during its research. 

The biggest highlight of the process was that, at the end of the text output, ARI included a formatted PDF with all its findings in a formal report that looked like a research paper. This report included a cover with a relevant photo, a table of contents, and neat, two-column formatting.

How to access ARI (and its rivals)

Enterprises can now preview ARI on You.com Labs, “a testing ground for building new enterprise AI solutions,” according to the release. 

 Its OpenAI competitor, Deep Research, is available via OpenAI’s subscription tiers, including ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month. Gemini’s Deep Research feature (yes, it has the same name) is available for $20 per month with the Gemini Advanced subscription made available through the Google One AI Premium Plan.