The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search Platforms, Q4 2025
Cognitive search platforms enable enterprises to leverage their knowledge using large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The market has experienced renewed interest over the past two years as buyers seek to implement AI capabilities. These platforms will become essential as the 'brains' of accurate agentic AI, requiring vendors to demonstrate not only current functionality but also strategic roadmaps for the emerging agentic AI revolution. Buyers must assess vendor capabilities across enterprise data integration, deployment scalability, and product roadmaps for agentic futures.
No common features specified.
Vendors must, among other requirements:
A: This research evaluates 14 cognitive search platform providers across current offering capabilities, strategic vision, and customer feedback. The evaluation focuses on how these platforms integrate with enterprise data infrastructure, scale for cognitive search deployments, and support the emerging agentic AI future. It includes detailed scorecards for each vendor showing their strengths and weaknesses across data connectors, search methods, query capabilities, intent understanding, relevancy, results delivery, analytics, scale, security, and strategic elements like vision, innovation, roadmap, partner ecosystem, and pricing.
A: This research should be used by cognitive search platform customers making purchase decisions who need to evaluate vendors based on: 1) Integration capabilities with enterprise data infrastructure and the breadth/depth of data connectors needed; 2) Ability to deploy cognitive search at enterprise scale with proper security, privileged access management, and understanding of costs and limitations; 3) Product roadmaps addressing the emerging agentic AI future, as cognitive search and knowledge retrieval form the basis of most agentic applications. Buyers should use the interactive provider comparison experience to adapt findings based on their specific priorities.
A: Vendors must natively provide all core cognitive search functions and have a demonstrated track record for supporting large enterprises. The solution must be available as a standalone product with its own SKU and pricing (not just a free feature). Vendors must have at least $10 million in annual revenue from cognitive search platforms in the last four quarters and substantial mindshare among Forrester's enterprise clients, with frequent mentions by other vendors as competitors.
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A: Strength of Offering (vertical axis) measures current technical capabilities and features available today, including data connectivity, search methods, relevancy, scalability, and platform security. Strength of Strategy (horizontal axis) evaluates future positioning through vision, innovation investment, product roadmap, partner ecosystem, market adoption, and pricing approach. Offering focuses on 'what exists now' while Strategy focuses on 'where the vendor is headed' for agentic AI future.