Enterprise AI moves from retrieval to execution
Danny Wheller, VP of Business & Strategy at Hebbia, on vertical vs horizontal enterprise AI
The real bottleneck in enterprise search was never finding files, it was turning scattered documents into finished work. Earlier tools could point a banker or lawyer to the right PDF, but the analyst still had to read hundreds of pages, compare clauses, pull numbers into Excel, and write the memo. Hebbia is built around that post search step, using Matrix and ISD to reason across full documents and produce diligence outputs, contract analysis, and pitch materials rather than just a list of links.
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This is why old enterprise search was hard to monetize. If the product saves a few minutes locating a file, budget is limited. If it helps complete a live workflow like VDR diligence or contract review, the ROI maps to billable hours and transaction speed, which supports Hebbia's much higher per seat pricing than broad search tools like Glean.
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LLMs mattered because they added reasoning after retrieval, not because retrieval alone suddenly became easy. Hebbia describes using LLMs for both better document and metadata understanding and for decomposing complex questions into many smaller passes over full document sets, which is how it moves beyond search and summarization into actual execution.
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The market is splitting into horizontal systems that index everything and vertical tools that do the job itself. Glean centers on secure, company wide search, summaries, and broad workflow access across 100 plus tools. Hebbia goes deeper in finance and legal, where users care less about universal search and more about whether the system can produce an investment memo or analyze a credit agreement correctly.
The category is heading toward workflow native agents, not better search boxes. The winners will be the products that combine retrieval, reasoning, permissions, and human review into a system that can finish real business tasks inside regulated workflows. That shift favors tools like Hebbia in high stakes domains, while horizontal platforms keep expanding as the shared data and access layer underneath them.