Perplexity’s Carbon integration will make it easier for enterprises to connect their data to AI search

2024 for Puzzled. The artificial intelligence search startup, founded by former DeepMind and OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in its latest funding round It is said The company is valued at $9 billion and has launched several noteworthy features, including Number of pages, spaceand innovative shopping experiences.

These developments solidify Perplexity’s reputation as an “AI-first” knowledge discovery engine, unlike traditional search giants like Google and Bing, which are attaching AI capabilities to existing engines.

However, the journey is far from over.

In the face of increasing competition, Perplexity is expanding its business scope, adding new product portfolio: carbon. The company has just obtained The startup, for an undisclosed sum, aims to solve the “data gap” enterprises are experiencing in artificial intelligence hunting and streamline the knowledge discovery process in their workflows.

Carbon has developed a comprehensive search framework that simplifies the process of connecting external sources to the LL.M. Users can click on Carbon Universal API or software development kit Synchronize their sources and retrieve materials for use by the LL.M. It provides native integration with more than 20 data connectors and supports more than 20 file formats, including text, audio, and video files.

Artificial intelligence search scope continues to expand

From individuals to enterprise users, almost everyone uses AI search as part of their workflow today. The idea behind this technology is simple – you don’t have to browse through tons of links and content to find relevant insights and information. Instead, the information is provided to you as a direct answer to your query.

Perplexity thrives on this approach, using a series of large language models to retrieve information from the web and simplify the way users work. It even allows teams to extract information from their personal or business documents, such as PDF and Word files.

But here’s the thing. The web is the home of public information, and for business users dealing with large amounts of proprietary data, uploading internal documents (PDFs, conversations, images) alone is not feasible. This affects the quality of the answer, keeping it generic and lacking important context relevant to the organization.

Sanjeev Mohan, former research vice president of data and analytics at Gartner, highlighted this “data gap,” telling VentureBeat that one of the biggest AI trends in 2025 will be ETL unstructured data. It will allow teams to extract and transform data from disparate internal sources, ultimately helping their LLMs generate highly relevant and accurate responses.

Now, that’s exactly what Perplexity plans to acquire Carbon’s comprehensive, streamlined search framework. Perplexity will integrate Carbon’s search engine and connectors into its technology stack, giving users of the search platform a direct way to plug in disparate sources, from Google Docs and Notion to Hubspot and Slack.

The company said this will expand the AI ​​search engine’s knowledge base, making its responses to users more comprehensive, relevant and personal.

What can users expect from Carbon-powered Perplexity?

Although Perplexity just acquired Carbon and the integration has yet to be implemented, it’s easy to imagine how the additional data connectors will improve the workflow of enterprise teams using AI search engines.

例如，如果必須更改發布日期並需要弄清楚團隊設定的最新截止日期和指導方針，Perplexity 將能夠解析Google Docs、Notion 和Slack 中的所有數據，並做出必要的調整相關性——找到回答問題的message.

Essentially, there’s no longer a need to worry about stitching together context from the web, a single app, and a message. The platform does all the work itself to provide answers.

“The significant benefit of this setup is that our technology can find the answer without you having to pinpoint the file/database where the information is stored,” Sara Platnick, director of communications at Perplexity, told VentureBeat.

Another example might be extracting customer meeting insights, she said. Perplexity instantly pulls conversation details and focus from the connected CRM.

It is worth noting that by using Carbon Retrieval enhancement generation (RAG) workflow, Perplexity makes enterprise search more accessible, saving companies the hassle of building their own RAG pipelines from scratch.

“By using Perplexity and Carbon to find and interpret proprietary data, companies can solve a multifaceted set of AI use cases. We found that leading adopters are most focused on customer service, document processing, image processing, and recommendation engines,” BARC US Kevin Petrie, vice president of research, told VentureBeat.

Execution will be key

Getting Carbon is just the beginning. The real key is execution, or how seamlessly and securely a startup’s technology is integrated. After all, we are talking about proprietary material from some of the most critical knowledge repositories maintained by the enterprise.

“Companies are right to be cautious about disclosing their intellectual property to the public. Therefore, Perplexity and Carbon need to provide governance controls to ensure companies can keep the material within their own firewalls. They have no interest in sharing secrets or training public models to imitate their intellectual property rights,” Petrie added.

In the case of Perplexity, Platnick noted that “all information from internal and private sources on the engine is encrypted, as is all data transmitted and stored in the Carbon data connector.” She also noted that the company has additional protections in place, To ensure that private files remain private and cannot be accessed by unauthorized users.

As of now, there is no specific timetable for the integration of Carbon and Perplexity. However, the startup will cease operations of its managed API on March 31, 2025.