Harnessing unstructured data to fuel AI

(Image credit: Future)

The rule that your AI is only as good as your data is now well understood, with businesses all over the world looking to modernize their data sources and infrastructure to make the most of AI products and services.

But something that can be easily lost in these discussions is consideration of the exact format your data exists in at rest. Unstructured data is especially important for AI and knowing where it fits into your AI strategy is essential. This doesn’t just mean knowing where it resides and capturing it, but also storing it in architecture that makes it searchable, secure, and accessible whenever you need it.

In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with Nasuni, Jane and Rory are joined by Jim Liddle, chief innovation officer of data intelligence and AI at Nasuni, to discuss using unstructured data in the most effective way possible.

Highlights

“Firstly, AI models thrive on massive amounts of data to learn effectively. I think that's something that's probably embedded in all of our psyche, in the last two or three years, and unstructured data itself represents the largest amount of untapped data in most enterprises.”

“By centralizing unstructured data using a hybrid cloud approach like Nasuni, you can create a unified data foundation, and that ultimately means that you'll be well positioned not only for any future storage expansion back to that very first topic about growing 80 to 85% per annum, but also for AI initiatives because that's ultimately what companies care about.”

“If you want your house to be built and to stay strong for a long time, you build it on solid foundations. If you want to have an AI strategy for your corporation, can you knock off some simple use cases by not going away and building yourself a solid data foundation? Yeah, you probably can. But is that going to really put you in a place for the long term, that you can have a long term AI strategy, or are you going to end up having to revisit that whole architecture, do some complex integration plumbing? The reality is, yes, you probably will.”

Footnotes

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Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.