PHOTO: lzf Linda C. Smith, then a doctoral student at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, published a landmark paper in 1976 on the role of AI in information retrieval. Forty years later, her thesis came to fruition. Over the last few years, software vendors have positioned AI as the solution to every known enterprise search problems. Yet surveys carried out from 2016 to 2020 (and indeed way back to 2007) all indicate that search is not in any way a solved problem and indeed, only in a minority of cases is search regarded as very satisfactory. Why are companies prepared to accept anything less?