Pinecone has announced the general availability of Pinecone Nexus, a knowledge engine that transforms an enterprise's proprietary data and workflows into governed, agent-ready knowledge. On its debut on τ-Knowledge, Sierra's open benchmark for enterprise knowledge tasks, an agent using Nexus as its knowledge layer posted the top score, outperforming agents built on frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Pinecone Nexus achieves top score on Sierra's τ-Knowledge benchmark.
Cuts token costs by more than 90% over agentic RAG.
Answers up to 30 times faster with more than 90% accuracy.
Reduces cost per task by 74-81% compared to frontier models alone.
Deploys in customer's cloud with zero access and no lock-in.
Native governance with field-level access control, citations, and lineage.
The first era of enterprise AI was built by developers for human users. Retrieval systems like RAG pipelines, vector search, and brute-force agentic search assumed a human in the loop who could read the results, catch the wrong ones, and try again. Agents are now the dominant consumer of enterprise AI. Costs are exploding as they run those same systems autonomously. More than 85% of LLM effort goes to retrieving knowledge from the underlying data, driving accuracy down and latency up on every task. Pinecone Nexus solves these problems by delivering a knowledge layer purpose-built for agents, compiling an enterprise's data into governed, domain-specific knowledge that agents query through KnowQL, a declarative query language built for agents.
τ-Knowledge is Sierra's open-source benchmark for agentic customer support work that demands multi-step reasoning, strict policy adherence, and coordinated tool use. The best frontier model on the current leaderboard, GPT-5.5, solves 46.4% of the tasks. With Nexus as the knowledge layer, an agent solved 47.4%, the top score on the benchmark. It also achieved 74% less cost per task compared to an agent using a frontier model without a Nexus knowledge layer. Pre-compiling knowledge lowers token costs by more than 90% over agentic RAG, answers up to 30 times faster, and completes tasks with more than 90% accuracy.
Nexus deploys in the customer's cloud and runs with zero access on the models they choose, including open-weight models. Outputs are open and portable with no lock-in. Governance is native: field-level access control, per-field citations, confidence scores, PII-aware ingestion, and lineage back to source. Enterprises keep their own knowledge and don't hand their competitive moat to model vendors. Nexus relies on subject matter experts to shape the knowledge so it fits the business context and workflows the enterprise runs every day.
"Enterprises adopting AI are squeezed from two sides," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Pinecone. "Agents burn tokens grinding through raw data, so cost and latency climb while accuracy stays lower than it should be. And every model call risks handing proprietary knowledge to a system that can turn around and compete with you. Nexus puts a knowledge engine in your own cloud, raises accuracy, lowers the total cost of running AI, and keeps your own experts shaping how agents work."
"Enterprises running agentic workloads have been hitting a real ceiling on cost, since retrieval and re-orientation can eat up the bulk of token spend before an agent ever reasons," says Devin Pratt, Research Director at IDC. "Pinecone's approach, compiling proprietary knowledge into a reusable layer instead of re-deriving it on every call, is a sensible response to that problem. It's a promising direction, and one worth watching as more enterprises evaluate precompiled knowledge layers."
About Pinecone
Pinecone is the trusted knowledge AI company. Its leading vector database and knowledge engine, Pinecone Nexus, power accurate, performant AI applications for more than 10,000 customers and 1M developers worldwide. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable.
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