AI Embraces the Ethos of Enterprise Search
October 9, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
In my files, I have examples of the marketing collateral generated by enterprise search vendors. I have some clippings from trade publications and other odds and ends dumped into my enterprise search folder. One of these reports is “Fastgründer John Markus Lervik dømt til fengsel.” The article is no longer online, but you can read my 2014 summary at this Beyond Search link. The write up documents an enterprise search vendor who used some alleged accounting methods to put a shine on the company. In 2008, Microsoft purchased Fast Search & Transfer putting an end to this interesting company.
A young CPA MBA BA (with honors) is jockeying a spreadsheet. His father worked for an enterprise search vendor based in the UK. His son is using his father’s template but cannot get the numbers to show positive cash flows across six quarters. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
Why am I mentioning Fast Search & Transfer? The information in Fortune Magazine’s “‘There’s So Much Pressure to Be the Company That Went from Zero to $100 Million in X Days’: Inside the Sketchy World of ARR and Inflated AI Startup Accounting” jogged my memory about Fast Search and a couple of other interesting companies in the enterprise search sector.
Enterprise search was the alleged technology to put an organization’s information at the fingertips of employees. Enterprise search would unify silos of information. Enterprise search would unlock the value of an organization’s “hidden” or “dark” data. Enterprise search would put those hours wasted looking for information to better use. (IDC was the cheerleader for the efficiency payoff from enterprise search.)
Does this sound familiar? It should every vendor applying AI to an organization’s information challenges is either recycling old chestnuts from the Golden Age of Enterprise Search or wandering in the data orchard discovering these glittering generalities amidst nuggets of high value jargon.
The Fortune article states:
There’s now a massive amount of pressure on AI-focused founders, at earlier stages than ever before: If you’re not generating revenue immediately, what are you even doing? Founders—in an effort to keep up with the Joneses—are counting all sorts of things as “long-term revenue” that are, to be blunt, nothing your Accounting 101 professor would recognize as legitimate. Exacerbating the pressure is the fact that more VCs than ever are trying to funnel capital into possible winners, at a time where there’s no certainty about what evaluating success or traction even looks like.
Would AI start ups fudge numbers? Of course not. Someone at the start up or investment firm took a class in business ethics. (The pizza in those study groups was good. Great if it could be charged to another group member’s Visa without her knowledge. Ho ho ho.)
The write up purses the idea that ARR or annual recurring revenue is a metric that may not reflect the health of an AI business. No kidding? When an outfit has zero revenue resulting from dumping investor case into a burning dumpster fire, it is difficult for me to understand how people see a payoff from AI. The “payoff” comes from moving money around, not from getting cash from people or organizations on a consistent basis. Subscription-like business models are great until churn becomes a factor.
The real point of the write up for me is that financial tricks, not customers paying for the product or service, are the name of the game. One big enterprise search outfit used “circular” deals to boost revenue. I did some small work for this outfit, so I cannot identify it. The same method is now part of the AI revolution involving Nvidia, OpenAI, and a number of other outfits. Whose money is moving? Who gets it? What’s the payoff? These are questions not addressed in depth in the information to which I have access?
I think financial intermediaries are the folks taking home the money. Some vendors may get paid like masters of black art accounting. But investor payoff? I am not so sure. For me the good old days of enterprise search are back again, just with bigger numbers and more impactful financial consequences.
As an aside, the Fortune article uses the word “shit” twice. Freudian slip or a change in editorial standards at Fortune? That word was applied by one of my team when asked to describe the companies I profiled in the Enterprise Search Report I wrote many years ago. “Are you talking about my book or enterprise search?” I asked. My team member replied, “The enterprise search thing.”
Stephen E Arnold, October 2025
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