The State of Search & AI 2026: Insights from 330 IT professionals

The intersection of search and artificial intelligence (AI), which brings together the defining features of advanced search retrieval and AI, is experiencing considerable growth and user enthusiasm. Organizations want to move beyond traditional keyword-based search and take advantage of generative and agentic workflows. However, enterprises seem to be stuck between exploration and execution. While many plan to implement the technology in the next 6 to 12 months, the exact plan forward is not as clear.

In this report, more than 330 IT leaders with decision-making responsibility for search solutions share the state of search and AI and its growth potential. The report examines how IT leaders are setting the vision for search in their organizations.

Findings from this report conclude that:

• Organizations are interested in search and AI with a few successfully moving from ambition to adoption. Search-powered AI is only integrated into business operations in 6% of respondent organizations, while over 70% of respondents are either evaluating or investigating.
• Internal use cases are the pragmatic path to search and AI success. Organizations that start with internal knowledge bases see higher implementation success rates (73% vs. 61% average), faster time to value (62% achieve ROI in under 12 months vs. 51% average), and fewer change management challenges (34% vs. 42% average).
• Search and AI projects face many obstacles to adoption, though expectations for ROI are optimistic. Data privacy, security, and compliance are the most common concerns in search vendor selection, cited by 70% of organizations as a top criterion, second only to cost at 73%.

Additional resources

• Labelbox enables customers to build better AI products with Elastic Search
• Elastic named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search Platforms, Q4 2025
• The most widely deployed, open source vector database