IDC report: The Business Value of the Elasticsearch Platform for Search and AI Experiences

As AI moves to production, the search and retrieval layer underneath determines whether your investment pays off or generates costly hallucinations.Yet many organizations are still stitching together siloed data and tools, homegrown vector databases, and disconnected observability stacks to support AI workloads that demand speed, accuracy, and scale, slowing their path to fast, effective AI experiences.

The Elasticsearch Platform fills this gap by equipping development teams with a complete data platform for search and AI. With access to semantic and hybrid search, state-of-the-art Jina models, and built-in security and observability capabilities, development teams can simplify context engineering to build, monitor, and secure search and AI experiences that deliver business impact.

To quantify the ROI and impact organizations achieve from delivering search and AI experiences on the Elasticsearch Platform, Elastic commissioned IDC to interview 11 large enterprises across financial services, healthcare, retail, software, and government. This in-depth analysis examines the substantial before and after-state benefits, performance gains, and cost savings organizations realized by implementing the Elasticsearch Platform for search and AI experiences.

The study found that organizations using the Elasticsearch Platform achieved a 517% three-year return on investment (ROI) and $13.4 million in annual benefits per organization. The investment paid for itself in 11 months while enabling teams to ship AI products 40% faster than before and lower cost per query by 15%.

 

"With the Elasticsearch Platform, we can grow our business however we want without worrying about whether our search stack will scale smoothly. Our AI business is growing, and we can grow at whatever pace we choose, serving more regions and more international customers."
— VP of AI and Analytics, Software

Highlights

In this IDC Business Value report, you'll find results of how the Elasticsearch Platform delivers:

• 517% three-year ROI, with payback in 11 months quantified across revenue gains, productivity improvements, and platform efficiencies
• $13.4 million in annual benefits per organization, driven largely by higher net revenue
• 40% faster time to a minimum viable AI product with 35% faster updates once live
• 44% more relevant search results and a 43% reduction in search abandonment, directly improving customer experience and retention
• 27% higher development team productivity enabling teams to build, modify, and deploy use cases more effectively
• 150 hours per year gained per employee from faster, more accurate internal search across enterprise workflows

Additional resources

• Learn about the Elasticsearch Platform
• See how Docusign transformed unstructured agreements into instant insights
• Discover how EY is pioneering generative AI experience in finance