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Taming the Wild West

Harness Your Unstructured Data for AI Innovation

About this survey

Taming the Wild West: Harness Your Unstructured Data for AI Innovation

Region: Global
Authors: Kevin Petrie and Merv Adrian

Traditional data teams, long accustomed to SQL tables, struggle to manage and govern unstructured data. But this new frontier—ranging from emails and documents to pictures and video or audio clips—is essential to the success of artificial intelligence. Organizations that apply AI models to these proprietary unstructured objects can enrich outputs, improve accuracy and gain competitive advantage. Data engineers and scientists must acquire new skills, tools and techniques to make these diverse inputs usable for GenAI in particular.  

This survey-based report assesses the state of unstructured data management. We explore requirements, obstacles, use cases, best practices and tool evaluation criteria for teams that support AI. Then we define how leading adopters integrate unstructured data, validate and govern it, then refine features and organize metadata to support model training and inference.

Data, AI and business executives should read this report to learn:

  • The unique challenges of unstructured data, including text, speech, images and video 
  • Why these data types hold differentiated value for AI adopters
  • How adopters manage this data to support humans and future agentic workforces
  • How governance teams address the risks of unstructured data
  • How data/AI platforms and tools must evolve to capture the value of unstructured data
  • What best practices leaders use to achieve business results

About our Topical Survey

BARC Topical Survey

Topical Survey support end-user organizations in their IT/digital strategies and their choice of partners. Our research analyzes the latest market and technology trends – as well as changes to ecosystems – to guide end-user organizations in their digital transformation journey.

Global surveys are based on 250+ participants.

Topical Survey are conducted in an independent and objective manner on behalf of several stakeholders.

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