Turning business data into business value

In modern businesses, your data is your value. This is not a new concept, but it can be a struggle to understand where to start when it comes to harnessing your data effectively.

Unstructured data, which can be generated in massive quantities before it ever produces value, can be especially difficult to handle. But if this task is completed correctly, businesses can future-proof their operations and lay the groundwork for future AI deployments.

What solutions are available to turn unstructured data into machine-readable content? And how does this feed into implementing in-demand tools such as AI agents?

In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with Hyland, Rory speaks to John Newton, chief innovation strategist at Hyland, to explore how businesses can harness their structured and unstructured data to generate value and enable AI tools.

Highlights

"Very few companies actually have their information under control. We've had a tsunami of information hit us over the last couple of decades and it never slows down. It just keeps on coming and nobody can keep up right now, it's just too cheap to create lots and lots of unstructured information – i.e. content – and not all of it's good. So something's got to change."

"What enterprise-grade means is to use that enterprise context to fit it within the context of the enterprise, its systems, its people, its processes. And how does that all come together in order to inform the agent? What decisions it makes, what actions it should take, what knowledge resources it should use in order to either deliver that information to the user or to feed into another system or to take an action of any sort."

"Are these new models going to be four times as powerful as before? Possibly. Are we going to get new algorithms? Probably. I think that those new models, new agents, and agent infrastructure are going to evolve. Agents will become more capable, more self-controlling and self-building. We're here to provide the specification, the contract of what the agent is supposed to be doing, more and more of that will be done. But that means spending more time in that specification to get it right, to be as encompassing as necessary. And that means having it informed by all the information that you've got already."

Footnotes

• Structured vs unstructured data management
• A quarter of firms still don’t have a formal data strategy – and it’s hampering AI adoption
• Data quality worries are holding back AI adoption among manufacturers, despite optimism over its growth potential
• AI is causing a data storage crisis for enterprises

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