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“
AI IS HERALDING
THE FOURTH
INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION
AND WILL
QUICKLY BECOME
INDISPENSABLE.
dealing with ‘structured data’. It’s
organised in a format that’s easy
for machines to process, such as a
database or a spreadsheet. Historically,
limited compute power meant that
only structured data could be analysed
effectively. This left organisations with
vast pools of valuable but untapped
‘unstructured data’ such as images,
documents, emails, video, audio, images
and social media posts. The lack of a
pre-defined structure made extracting
answers from this data extremely time
consuming, resulting in it being left on
the cutting room floor.
Advances in high-performance
technology mean that neural networks
can now work with unstructured data,
harvesting information that wasn’t
accessible before and drawing out
valuable insights previously hidden from
the organisation. As a result, Gartner
predicts that the volume of data will grow
by over 800% throughout the next four
years and the vast majority of it (80%)
will be unstructured. AI means that you
no longer need perfectly structured data
to get answers. The technology can work
with all types of data; it’s mainly about
locating it, labelling it and making it
available. Depending on the complexity
of the business challenge, many data
sources may need to be lined up, but
there are ways around not having your
own specialist data scientists. Working
with an enterprise performance partner
who has access to a pool of data
scientists is one of them.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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