8 Pitfalls of Gen AI in Search — and How to Avoid Them

In the rush to embrace the future, it’s easy to overlook the pitfalls of adopting new technologies. Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (Gen AI), despite their transformative potential in areas like site search and knowledge management software, are no exception. It’s not just about what these tools can do; it’s also about understanding the risks involved.

At Lucidworks, we’ve conducted extensive research to identify the hidden traps and pitfalls of deploying generative AI. The Lucidworks Platform helps you avoid these hazards, ensuring your digital transformation hits innovation and security goals.

Common Pitfalls of Gen AI in Search

Our global study reveals that companies not increasing their generative AI spending have four times as many AI-related concerns — and possess less confidence in addressing them. Let’s look into the potential dangers:

1. Financial Costs

The computational horsepower needed to run LLMs is significant, causing a surge in operational expenses. Initial investments can be misleading as the cost of ongoing maintenance adds up quickly. Over time, these hidden costs can impact your bottom line, making the ROI of generative AI less appealing.

• Solution: Cost-Efficiency

Lucidworks’ search platform optimizes computational resources, ensuring you get the most out of your investment. Its architecture is designed for scalability, allowing you to adjust computing power based on real-time needs, thereby reducing unnecessary costs. Not only this, but the search platform can control the data sent to LLMs and optimize content retrieval. This reduces the need for resource-intensive LLMs while improving efficiency and lowering expenses.

2. Time Wastage

Deploying generative AI without a solid foundation can lead to inefficiencies. The time spent troubleshooting and fine-tuning these models detracts from your core business objectives. What’s worse, this can result in project delays, affecting your market competitiveness.

• Solution: Time-Saving

The Lucidworks Platform’s intuitive interface simplifies the deployment and management processes, allowing you to focus on strategic goals. Automated features and pre-built connectors further expedite setup, making it easier to get your search platform up and running. The Lucidworks Platform has been designed explicitly for high scale and performance. Speed is improved, and latency in generative AI and LLM results is reduced by optimizing resource allocation and accelerating content retrieval.

3. Erosion of Trust

LLMs can sometimes produce misleading or biased content, which can erode customer trust and tarnish your brand image. Once trust is compromised, rebuilding is an uphill battle that can consume considerable resources.An example of this is the infamous Tay AI chatbot, which was launched by Microsoft in 2016. Within hours of its launch on Twitter, Tay began to tweet offensive and inappropriate messages that it had learned from conversations with users.

• Solution: Building Trust

Our cognitive search capabilities ensure accurate and unbiased search results, fostering trust among your user base. Through continuous learning and adjustments, the Lucidworks Platform refines its algorithms to offer increasingly accurate results, enhancing user satisfaction and trust. Lucidworks understands how to harmoniously integrate data between systems and models to ground responses truthfully. Thus helping to control the potential negative impact of hallucinations in generative AI and LLM results.

4. Data Security

Generative AI models often lack stringent security measures. This makes them susceptible to data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive information. Such vulnerabilities could have catastrophic consequences, including financial loss and reputational damage.

• Solution: Robust Security

The Lucidworks Platform comes with advanced security measures to safeguard sensitive data and comply with requirements. Multi-layered security protocols, including encryption and user authentication, fortify your system against potential breaches. The platform reduces the proprietary data that is sent to LLMs and provides suitable options for using public LLMs with generative AI.

5. Compliance Risks

Particularly in regulated industries like healthcare and finance, generative AI can inadvertently violate compliance guidelines, exposing your company to legal ramifications. Penalties for non-compliance can be severe and bring unwanted scrutiny to your operations.

• Solution: Ensuring Compliance

Lucidworks has a range of security features designed to protect your data and ensure compliance with industry standards. These features include role-based access control, which restricts access to sensitive information to only authorized users. This helps prevent accidental or intentional violations of compliance guidelines.

6. Ethical Considerations

The potential for generating biased or offensive content poses ethical challenges and could result in public relations disasters. Aside from tarnishing your brand, this could alienate a significant portion of your customer base.

• Solution: Ethical AI

We offer tools that help monitor and correct biases in AI-generated content, mitigating ethical risks. Lucidworks’ built-in analytics and reporting functions allow you to track any issues proactively, ensuring responsible AI usage. The platform can mitigate inappropriate use cases by project scoping, enabling ethical discussion, and the necessary monitoring controls. This will prevent harmful, unethical, or non-compliant content from being generated, ultimately promoting the safe use of generative AI and LLM results.

7. Lack of Contextual Relevance

Generative models are incapable of semantic search or understanding the context behind user queries, which can lead to irrelevant search results. This diminishes the user experience and can result in higher bounce rates on your platform.

• Solution: Contextual Understanding

Our semantic search and search personalization features ensure that user queries are understood and answered within the proper context. Lucidworks’ AI algorithms analyze user behavior and contextual factors to provide highly relevant and personalized search results. Lucidworks mitigates the drawbacks of poor RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) by leveraging recall retrieval. This ensures the system retrieves contextually pertinent and accurate data and results from a knowledge base.

8. Data Privacy Concerns

These models collect large volumes of data but offer limited control over data storage and usage, making GDPR compliance challenging. Failure to comply can lead to hefty fines and erode customer trust in your data management practices.

• Solution: Control Over Data Privacy

With Lucidworks, you have granular control over data storage and usage, facilitating GDPR compliance and enhancing data security. Our search platform provides customizable settings that allow you to define how user data is collected, stored, and utilized, giving you peace of mind concerning data governance.

How Lucidworks Addresses Pitfalls in Gen AI in Search

Lucidworks, the search experience management platform that delivers relevant content to shoppers and employees, effectively counters these pitfalls. It offers three key ways to incorporate AI into these sectors: Question Answering and Personalization, Content Enrichment, and Understanding and Personalization.

• Through Question Answering and Personalization, large language models are used to accurately answer complex questions about products, compatibility, usage, and more. This not only accelerates the path to purchase for customers but also improves their overall experience by providing relevant and accurate information.
• Content Enrichment is another feature within the Lucidworks Platform that uses AI to summarize lengthy documents and provide suggestions for refined queries. This not only helps users understand information more quickly but also improves relevance and accuracy in their search results.
• But beyond just answering questions and enriching content, AI also has the power to understand the context behind these interactions and personalize marketing and communication strategies accordingly. This level of personalization can greatly enhance the B2B customer experience and drive business success.

Digitally Transform Today With Lucidworks

While the allure of generative AI is undeniable, it comes with challenges that can’t be ignored. Lucidworks is more than just a search platform, it’s a comprehensive solution designed to address the multiple pitfalls of employing generative AI.

By choosing Lucidworks, you’re not just embracing cutting-edge search technology, you’re also ensuring that your path to digital transformation is devoid of the risks commonly associated with generative AI. We invite you to explore how Lucidworks can help you navigate the complexities of today’s digital landscape safely and efficiently.

Contact us today to learn more.