Generis uses Elastic AI to accelerate compliance and reporting for high-value customers

In regulated industries, where compliance and operational precision can make or break a business, Generis has become an indispensable partner. At the heart of its offering is the CARA Platform, a unified data and content management solution that underpins operations at some of the world's largest life sciences, financial services, and energy companies. These organizations rely on CARA to manage complex data workflows, including regulatory submissions, clinical trial data, and manufacturing processes.

Managing millions of documents on behalf of its customers is a huge undertaking. That's why Generis relies on Elasticsearch to store and search vast amounts of data for more than 750,000 end users in compliance, regulatory affairs, and quality assurance professions.

Generis first encountered Elastic in 2018. At that time, CARA was a front end for a different content management platform and a relational database from another vendor. Full-text searches could take up to 30 seconds, and data aggregation was impossible due to database limitations. Mariusz Pala, CTO, Generis, says, "To deliver lightning-fast documents and data search for our clients, change was essential."

Pala and his team decided to build a new platform from scratch. "Relational databases didn’t meet our performance goals, so we turned to Elastic," he says. Rigorous testing confirmed Elastic’s market-leading performance, and in 2020, Generis launched the new CARA Platform, seamlessly migrating existing customers to the updated environment.

It was an immediate success. Customers noticed a 1000% reduction in average search times compared with the previous architecture. "The decision to embrace Elastic Search paid off for both existing customers and prospects," says Pala. "It has been one of our main growth drivers ever since."

Another key milestone was the launch of Elastic Cloud, which Generis now runs on its preferred cloud provider AWS. The majority of customers use CARA in this environment, although Generis offers Elastic Cloud Enterprise as an alternative for clients who stipulate self-hosted solutions.

This scalable, cost-effective infrastructure appeals to organizations of all sizes—from those managing a few million documents to enterprises storing nearly a billion. In total, Generis currently maintains a capacity of 21 terabytes, distributed across three nodes with seven terabytes each.

In recent years, Generis has worked closely with Elastic, seeking opportunities to integrate AI capabilities into the CARA platform. The launch of Elastic 8.15 was a significant moment, enabling Generis developers to implement AI search features with out-of-the-box semantic search and generative AI technology.

In just a few weeks, the team deployed a chatbot taking advantage of Elastic's built-in ability to index and search vectorized data. "One of the great strengths of Elastic is that you don't need a vector database from another vendor. It's just there as an integral part of the platform," says Pala.

The new chatbot, known as 'Chat with Data', offers a helping hand to customers working in highly regulated industries. In addition to retrieving information from a vast database, customers can automatically generate complex documents, such as regulatory submissions or audits, in far less time than before.

Generis itself has seen significant benefits from Chat with Data. The platform has transformed the process of drafting Request for Proposal (RFP) documents, which previously took up to two weeks. Now, with automation and AI-driven insights, the turnaround time has been cut to just 2 days, allowing the Generis team to focus on higher-value tasks.

Pala also plans to deploy Elastic Cloud Serverless, enabling Generis to deploy and use Elastic without managing the underlying infrastructure. This delivers seamless scaling without the need to re-index data, while also optimizing infrastructure costs by enabling clusters to be paused when not in use.

Generis also benefits from dedicated support provided by Elastic, ensuring smooth operations and proactive problem-solving through monthly in-depth discussions about opportunities and regular updates on upcoming features and roadmap developments.

When issues arise, Elastic addresses them promptly with clear communication. "The support we receive is excellent. Issues are resolved without hesitation, and the insights we gain help us plan for the future with confidence," he says.