Cohesity is announcing a visual data exploration capability for its Gaia generative AI product, featuring word cloud images, plus support for new data sources.
Gaia is a generative AI search assistant using large language model (LLM) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology to look at enterprise data. Users can, Cohesity says, have a conversation with their data because Gaia indexes and provides insights based on data stored in multiple formats, including emails, documents, PDFs, text files, spreadsheets, HTML, XML, and presentations. A word cloud is a graphic showing single words or phrases with their size and brightness related to the number of times they occur in a set of source documents.
Gaia’s patent-pending data explorer feature automatically visually maps customers’ datasets based on semantic indexing and creates a list of suggested questions and queries, a word cloud. Cohesity states that this feature adds new context to the data and the suggested queries help users gain insights faster.
Cohesity CTO Craig Martell commented: “It should be easy for business users to ask a question of their data and get an accurate, useful result, even if the data resides in disparate locations and different systems or how far back in history it goes. That is the promise of what Cohesity Gaia will deliver.”
The feature uses topic modeling, a set of AI techniques with natural language processing, to identify thematic structures across documents and files. It works by finding patterns of repeated words in documents and groups them into so-called topics or themes. These can be organized by dataset. There could be finance department topics, marketing topics, HR topics, and so forth. Users can click through each topic, ask conversational questions, and interact with context-aware prompts to find relevant information.
Cohesity says it will host a series of AI workshops to give customers and prospects a hands-on look at the data explorer and learn more about how Gaia can help them discover new insights from their business data.
The new Gaia data sources are Microsoft 365 Mail, 365 SharePoint, and 365 OneDrive, and on-prem or cloud-based file servers, including Dell Isilon, NetApp NAS, physical file servers, and Cohesity Smartfiles.
Chirag Mehta, Principal Cybersecurity Analyst with Constellation Research, stated: “By addressing the challenge of managing and extracting insights from unstructured data across disparate systems, Cohesity Gaia and its new visual data explorer have the potential to revolutionize data accessibility for enterprises.”
Comment
This visual data explorer feature will be helpful to users looking into unfamiliar datasets. A financial executive will be knowledgeable about their department’s data sources and their organization, having context and background knowledge. A visitor or novice authorized to look into such a dataset could find Gaia’s word cloud and guided queries to be helpful. There’s more information on Cohesity’s AI workshops website. Further details about Gaia’s visual data explorer will be posted in Cohesity’s blog.
