The Best AI Enterprise Search Tool for Teams That Also Run AI Agents

TL;DR

Teams that also run AI agents need a search tool for finding files and a memory the agents read for facts. Glean is the strongest dedicated search product with agent access. Sentra is the memory side: over MCP and REST it gives every agent the current fact with its source and date, where search returns documents to read.

Why agents change what you need from search

Enterprise search was designed for a person. It returns ten results, the person opens two, notices that one is last year's version and uses the other. An agent given the same ten results reads all of them into its prompt, cannot tell which is current, and pays for every token. The judgment a person applies after the search is the part an agent is missing.

So a team running agents should ask two separate questions. Can the search tool be called by an agent, with the user's permissions carried through? And when the agent needs a fact, such as the current owner of an account or the terms agreed last month, does anything return the fact itself?

The options, compared for agent use

Glean's site describes connectors to work apps such as Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub and Salesforce with "permission-aware access built in from day one" (glean.com), and its MCP server exposes search, chat and document reading to clients such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. Microsoft lists over 100 prebuilt Copilot connectors, plus federated connectors that fetch live data over MCP without indexing it. Gemini Enterprise offers permission-aware enterprise search and agent actions in every edition, per its editions documentation. GoSearch's pricing page lists Pro at $20 per user per month, with API access on the Enterprise plan. Elastic removed its standalone Workplace Search product in version 9.0 and points customers to Elasticsearch itself (elastic.co). The full reviews are in our enterprise search tools comparison.

What Sentra adds for agents

Sentra is the organization memory that works with whichever search tool you choose. It connects to email, chat, meetings, documents, CRM and project systems through more than 200 integrations, and works out what is true now: what was decided, who owns it, and when a fact stopped being true. That work happens when information arrives, so an agent's question is answered from resolved facts and not from a fresh crawl.

For an agent this changes three things. It receives one answer with a source and a date, where search returns a list to read. Two agents asking the same question get the same answer, because they read the same record. And the cost falls, because the agent is not loading documents to recover one fact: on Terminal-Bench 2.1, a coding agent with Sentra scored 88.31% mean reward against an 83.37% baseline across 445 trials, at 72.6% lower model cost and 41.2% fewer tokens.

Permissions carry through. An OAuth connection signs the agent in as the person, Sentra checks access at query time against synced access lists, and a failed check counts as no access. People ask the same memory in the Sentra app or in Slack.

In the Glass Company, an independent test built and scored by Era by Eon, Sentra read a simulated 1,200-person company it had never seen and found 495 of the 497 problems hidden in it, in 102 minutes. Claude Opus, given the same systems, found 8%. A search box cannot do that, because nobody knew what to search for.

When something else fits better

Sentra is not a replacement for a search index. If the job is finding a specific file, or powering search on your website or in your product, choose one of the search products above. If your agents only need to look up documents inside Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the suite's own search and agents are the shortest path. And if you have one agent answering from a fixed set of manuals, retrieval over those manuals is enough. The line between the two categories is drawn in organizational brain vs enterprise search, and a direct comparison is in Sentra vs Glean.

How to choose

1. List what your agents actually ask. Sort the questions into "find me the document" and "tell me what is true".

2. For the first group, pick search by where your content lives: Glean across many apps, Microsoft or Google inside their suites.

3. For the second group, check whether any tool returns a dated fact. Ask for something you know changed and see if the old version comes back as current.

4. Check that an agent call carries the user's permissions, not a shared service account.

To see the second group answered on your own data, book a demo.

FAQ