Using AI to work with corporate data sounds simple, but in practice, it often hits a snag: the model can't properly search through your files. This is especially true when these files aren't neat text documents, but rather spreadsheets, meeting recordings, or training videos.
Yandex AI Studio has updated its built-in tool for AI agents, called File Search. In short, agents can now go beyond working with text to find necessary information in spreadsheets, audio files, and videos.
What is File Search and Why Do You Need It?
An AI agent is more than just a chatbot that answers questions. It's a more autonomous system capable of using tools: searching the internet, calling functions, and querying databases. File Search is one such tool that allows an agent to search through uploaded files and find relevant snippets within them.
Simply put, you upload your documents, and the agent knows how to “navigate” them – finding the right information without reading everything from start to finish.
This is especially relevant for corporate scenarios. A company might have an internal knowledge base with regulations, instructions, call recordings, and financial spreadsheets. Previously, an agent's ability to work with such data was limited. Now, the possibilities have expanded.
What's New in the Update?
The key enhancement is support for new file types. Previously, the tool primarily focused on text formats. Now, it also supports:
- Spreadsheets – the agent can search the contents of Excel and CSV files to find specific rows or values.
- Audio – files with speech recordings are first transcribed and then made searchable.
- Video – similarly, the audio track is extracted from the video and recognized, allowing the agent to search the resulting transcription.
This means you can now, for instance, upload a meeting recording and ask the agent to find the moment a specific issue was discussed. Or you could upload a spreadsheet with sales data and ask a question in natural language – the agent will figure out where to look on its own.
How It Works Conceptually
File search in these systems doesn't work like a simple Ctrl+F. When a file is uploaded, the system breaks it into chunks and represents each one as a numerical “fingerprint” – a kind of semantic snapshot. When the agent receives a query, it likewise “encodes” the query and searches for the most semantically similar chunks from the uploaded files.
This allows it to find relevant information even when the query's wording doesn't exactly match the text in the document. This approach is called semantic search – searching by meaning, not by keywords.
For audio and video, there's an additional preliminary step: the speech is first converted to text, and then the same mechanism works on that text.
Where Can This Be Useful?
Here are a few scenarios where the updated File Search proves practical:
- Customer Support – an agent works with a knowledge base of internal instructions and quickly finds answers to non-standard customer questions.
- HR and Training – with uploaded training videos, a new employee can ask questions and receive answers linked to specific segments.
- Finance and Analytics – an agent accesses data tables and answers questions without the need to manually construct queries.
- Legal and Compliance – searching through large volumes of documents, contracts, or regulations.
In all these cases, the key advantage is that there's no need to pre-structure data for the AI. You just need to upload what you already have.
What to Keep in Mind
Semantic file search is a powerful tool, but it has its quirks. It excels at searching “by meaning,” but can make mistakes with details: it might mix up similar fragments, miss subtle differences in wording, or return a less-than-perfect excerpt. This isn't a flaw in this specific implementation – it's a general characteristic of the approach.
For tasks where character-level precision is crucial (like finding a specific number in a table), it's wise to double-check the results. For tasks where you just need to “find something about this topic,” it works well.
It's also important to remember that the quality of audio and video search depends directly on the quality of speech recognition. If the recording is poor, has a strong accent, or contains technical noise, the results may be less accurate.
The File Search update in Yandex AI Studio is a step toward enabling AI agents to work with real-world corporate data, not just neatly prepared texts. Support for spreadsheets, audio, and video expands the range of scenarios where an agent can be useful without extensive data preparation beforehand.
For those building internal tools with AI or just considering the possibility, this update is worth keeping in mind – especially if your company has accumulated a lot of “live” content like recordings, spreadsheets, and unstructured documents.
