You.com Unveils ARI: A Groundbreaking AI Research Agent for Enterprise-Level Market Analysis

You.com unveils AI research agent that processes 400+ sources at once

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More You.com launched a new artificial intelligence research tool today that promises to transform how businesses conduct market research by analyzing hundreds of sources simultaneously and producing comprehensive reports in minutes instead of weeks. The tool, called Advanced Research & Insights agent (ARI), targets the $250 billion management consulting industry by automating the labor-intensive research process that typically requires teams of analysts poring over documents for days or weeks. "The entire world of knowledge work is changing, and that's a trillion dollar plus industry," said Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of You.com, in an interview with VentureBeat. "When every employee has instant access to comprehensive, validated insights that previously required teams of consultants and weeks of work, it changes the speed and quality of business decision-making." 10X more sources: How ARI's technical breakthrough powers enterprise research What sets ARI apart from existing AI research tools is its ability to process and analyze more than 400 sources simultaneously -- roughly ten times the number that competing systems can handle, according to the company. This capability comes from a novel approach to managing context and compressing information. "The way that we're able to find that many sources is because we're taking this iterative research approach," Bryan McCann, co-founder and CTO of You.com, told VentureBeat. "We bring back an initial set of sources, summarize and create a first research report, and then gather even more. At each step, we're compressing that information down so we're only adding new things." ARI doesn't just compile text-based reports. The system automatically generates interactive visualizations based on the data it discovers -- a feature You.com claims is unique among current AI research tools. During a demonstration, Socher showed examples of automatically generated reports on renewable energy that included interactive plots showing market size, growth expectations, and the mix of renewable versus fossil fuels. "It puts together this beautiful PDF," Socher said. "Since it talks about energy, it includes useful plots looking at market size, market growth expectations, mix of renewables and fossil fuels, solar energy growth rates." 'Click to Verify': How ARI solves AI's accuracy problem for business users Crucially for enterprise customers, ARI provides direct source verification for every claim. Users can click on any citation and the system will highlight exactly where the information came from, making fact-checking substantially faster. "When you click on the citation, it actually scrolls down and highlights exactly where it found that fact," Socher demonstrated. "If your career and your job depends on the facts being right, that's very helpful." You.com is positioning ARI primarily for enterprise customers in research-intensive industries. Early adopters include Germany's largest medical publisher, Wort & Bild Verlag, and global consulting firm APCO Worldwide. "We already have several hundreds of active accounts from each major consulting company," Socher noted. "We're excited to partner with them and help them be more productive." Dr. Dennis Ballwieser, Managing Director at Wort & Bild Verlag, reported that research time using ARI "has dropped from a few days to just a few hours" and praised the accuracy across both German and English content. ARI enters an increasingly crowded marketplace for AI research tools. Recent weeks have seen announcements of DeepSeek, Claude 3.7 from Anthropic, and various other research-oriented models. Socher claims ARI differentiates itself through comprehensiveness, verification capabilities, and speed. "Compared to research tools from OpenAI, for instance, ARI has 10 times the sources, but at the same time, it's three times faster," he said. Unlike some competing systems, ARI doesn't make decisions about which information is most trustworthy but instead presents comprehensive findings. "ARI is optimized for comprehensiveness, so if it comes across contradicting statements, it's much more likely to just tell you this source said this, and these sources said that," McCann explained. "It's not really inclined to make the decision for you as to which information is the most trustworthy." Beyond public data: How ARI integrates enterprise's internal knowledge A key aspect of ARI's enterprise strategy is its ability to incorporate internal company data alongside public sources -- creating a bridge between an organization's proprietary information and the broader research landscape. "The biggest thing that we're already doing now with enterprise customers is to give ARI access to their company internal data," Socher said. "So you get all these amazing dashboards and insights right away about your own organization." You.com is taking an unusual approach to pricing ARI, charging per report rather than based on computational resources consumed -- a strategy that aligns costs with business value rather than technical implementation. "We're looking at pricing not by token anymore, but more on a usage basis, at the actual response level," McCann explained. "Thinking of it more like the final piece of collateral that comes out is the thing that you're paying for -- orders of magnitude cheaper than it would have cost in the past." This approach reflects You.com's belief that AI usage will follow Jevons paradox -- as efficiency increases, total consumption rises rather than falls. "Of course, the training will get cheaper," said Socher. "But at the same time, when everyone realizes the more compute you give a model, the better the results get, it doesn't even make sense to think of one model as how intelligent it is." From research to action: ARI's future as an autonomous business agent You.com sees ARI as just the first step in transforming how organizations approach knowledge work. The company plans to make ARI more agentic -- capable of taking independent actions based on research findings. "For as long as we've been building it, we've wanted to make it more agentic," McCann said. "If you can access almost all of the information out there about a thing, that should provide a better foundation for any decision making on top of that information." Socher frames You.com's evolution around what he calls "the four A's: accurate answers, agents and AGI." He envisions a future where everyone becomes a manager of AI systems. "Kids that grow up with Siri and Alexa in the house already learn to assign certain questions to those things," Socher observed. "That's the first baby steps of becoming managers for AI." And as those AIs get smarter, we're going to manage them more carefully while giving them increasingly complex tasks -- with research reports being just the beginning of what promises to be a profound transformation in how knowledge work gets done.

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

The agent can analyze up to 400 sources and publish a report in five minutes. 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." 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. Also: ChatGPT's Deep Research just identified 20 jobs it will replace. Is yours on the list? 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." Also: What is Perplexity Deep Research, and how do you use it? 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. 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." Also: What is DeepSeek AI? Is it safe? Here's everything you need to know 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. 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.