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InfoQ Homepage News Pinecone Introduces Nexus Engine for Compiling Business Context into Structured Data for AI Agents

Pinecone Introduces Nexus Engine for Compiling Business Context into Structured Data for AI Agents

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Now generally available, Pinecone Nexus is a "knowledge engine" for AI agents that transforms enterprise data into a structured layer agents can query directly. It enables teams to ingest and curate business context once for all, making it reusable across agents and reducing token costs while improving accuracy.

Pinecone argues that while large language models "are great at world knowledge" and vector databases make it easy to "find specific information buried across files", enterprises depend on a different layer of knowledge: business context. This context usually lives scattered through "contracts, wikis, HR docs, meeting notes, support tickets, and financial records".

Agents can search through this information, but doing so every time they start a task is highly inefficient and leads to higher token costs as well as slower and potentially incomplete answers.

Pinecone Nexus is a knowledge engine that closes that gap. It compiles an enterprise's distributed knowledge into a structured layer agents can query directly, shifting token spend out of the per-query retrieval loop and into a one-time curation step.

Pinecone reports that early adopters of Nexus have seen significant performance gains, particularly in financial services and legal research. In the legal domain, Nexus completed all assigned tasks, compared to just 6% for a coding agent and 66% for a RAG system. The RAG system struggled with "doctrine synthesis, cross-case reasoning, and coverage questions, the shapes that require many sources assembled into one answer". Token spend was also substantially lower, reduced by approximately ~9–15×, according to Pinecone.

Similar improvements were found for enterprise data management, with a 90% accuracy, vs. 65% of a RAG system, and a curation cost of $0.0038 per document.

Pinecone Nexus is built around the concept of workspace, the top-level container for all resources, usually associated to a team or business unit. Within a workspace, data is organized into contexts, each representing a specific dataset or knowledge domain. A manifest defines how raw data sources should be ingested and converted into structured knowledge. Through manifests, subject matter expertise is incorporated directly into the system:

A subject matter expert can design a blueprint defining the artifact types and relationships that encode their domain knowledge into the curation layer before any query runs. The agent isn't left to figure out the structure of the corpus at query time. It inherits the SME's understanding of it.

Data ingestion is handled through connectors that support a range of sources, including local files, Box, and Microsoft OneLake. Support for Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Notion, Confluence, and S3 is expected soon, according to Pinecone. Once ingested and curated, the data can be queried via KnowQL, which is used by agents, chatbots, and recommendation systems alike.

Pinecone Nexus includes a preview playground where users can connect their data sources, design a context, and run a query to validate their approach. It also offers a BYOC (Bring your own Cloud) deployment options for environments where "data residency, security, and compliance are non-negotiable".

Other existing solutions similar to Pinecon Nexus include Cognite, RationalAI, LlamaIndex and others.

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