You.com has unveiled a new artificial intelligence research tool named Advanced Research & Insights agent (ARI), poised to reshape the way businesses conduct market research. According to the company, the tool can analyze hundreds of sources concurrently, producing detailed reports in a matter of minutes rather than the weeks typically required with traditional methods.
ARI is designed to target the management consulting industry, which represents a $250-billion market. It aims to automate the complex and time-consuming research process that currently necessitates teams of analysts sifting through volumes of documents. “The entire world of knowledge work is changing, and that’s a trillion-dollar-plus industry,” said Richard Socher, cofounder 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.”
Extensive Source Analysis
ARI differentiates itself from other AI research tools through its capacity to process and analyze over 400 sources at the same time. This capability enables users to access approximately 10 times more sources than competing systems. This advantage stems from a novel strategy for managing context and compressing information.
Bryan McCann, cofounder and CTO of You.com, explained, “The way that we’re able to find that many sources is [that] we’re taking this iterative research approach. 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 goes beyond simply compiling text-based reports; it automatically generates interactive visualizations based on the data it uncovers. This feature is unique among current AI research tools, according to You.com. During a demonstration, Socher showcased automatically generated reports on renewable energy that included interactive plots. “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.”
Accuracy and Verification
Crucially, ARI provides direct source verification for every claim it makes, which is particularly important for enterprise customers. Users can click on any citation, and the system will highlight precisely where the information originated. “When you click on the citation, it actually scrolls down and highlights exactly where it found that fact,” Socher stated. “If your career and your job depends on the facts being right, that’s very helpful.”
You.com is primarily targeting enterprise customers in research-intensive fields for ARI. Early adopters include Wort & Bild Verlag, Germany’s largest medical publisher, and APCO Worldwide, a global consulting firm. Socher noted, “We already have several hundreds of active accounts from each major consulting company. We’re excited to partner with them and help them be more productive.”
Dr. Dennis Ballwieser, managing director at Wort & Bild Verlag, reported that, through the use of ARI, research time “has dropped from a few days to just a few hours.” He also praised the accuracy of its results across both German and English content.
Competitive Landscape
ARI is entering an already busy market for AI research tools. Recent announcements include DeepSeek, Claude 3.7 from Anthropic, and other research-oriented models. Socher claims that ARI differentiates itself through its 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 noted.
This comparison is significant, given the competitive landscape. OpenAI’s Deep Research, powered by its o3 model, leads the market with an approximately 8% hallucination rate but generally processes only 15-30 sources per query. Google launched its own Deep Research feature in December, and Perplexity and X.AI’s Grok 3 have also entered the field with similar offerings.
Unlike some competing systems, ARI does not make decisions about which information is most trustworthy. It presents comprehensive findings, making it likely to include even contradictory statements to ensure a complete picture. McCann explained, “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. It’s not really inclined to make the decision for you as to which information is the most trustworthy.”
Internal Data Integration
A critical aspect of ARI’s enterprise strategy involves integrating internal company data alongside public sources. This creates 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.”
Pricing and Future Plans
You.com is taking an unusual approach to pricing ARI, charging per report rather than based on computational resources consumed. This method aims to align costs with business value instead of 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 costs will continue to decrease,” said Socher. “But when everyone realizes that giving a model more computational resources at run-time produces better results, it no longer makes sense to think about intelligence as a fixed proper of any single model.”
You.com sees ARI as just the beginning of 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 when 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.
