Agentic Search Lifts Inference Costs 3-5x as Enterprise Gaps Persist
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Global – October 29, 2026 -- Some 34 percent of employees still struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs, according to Gartner's Market Guide for Enterprise AI Search, published in September 2025. Enterprises are now rearchitecting search around retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic AI, a shift that can multiply inference costs by three to five times at scale.
Gartner finds 36 percent of AI tool users still cannot access relevant information
Roughly 49 percent of workers now rely primarily on AI tools such as Copilot or Gemini for data discovery rather than traditional search interfaces. Yet 36 percent of those users still report difficulty reaching relevant information.