Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom – Clifford Stoll
We’ve been in the digital age for decades now and we are awash in data… but not necessarily information, understanding, or wisdom unless humans get involved to make sense of it all.
This is particularly true of unstructured data in enterprises. We’ve successfully rid ourselves of paper, voice and other “physical” communication forms to promptly burden ourselves with emails, texts, IMs, Web data, PDFs, SWIFT data, voice files, video files… and the list goes on.
So now we are awash in unstructured data.
To be sure we have made huge strides in extracting structured data from unstructured to feed the vast rivers of data processing that define every enterprise, but the sheer ingenuity of the human denizens of our enterprises unleashed by unrelenting tech innovation results in an ever growing torrent of unstructured data that simply cannot be stemmed.
If unstructured data were nothing more than husk separated from the structured data we needed, we could simply discard and be rid of it, but very often that unstructured data houses vital information that creates the context that lends shape and form to our enterprises. Rather like leaves on the stem. Structured data processing often pauses to solicit meaning from unstructured stores of information. And, narratives are often still the only way to convey complex concepts or requirements, e.g. regulations.
To find meaning, purpose and direction from all that unstructured data, we ultimately revert to humans who are the last resort to make sense of it all. So if you examine all those pockets of manual labor in the operations of any enterprise today, more often than not you find unstructured data processing by small armies of talented professionals who are applying their judgement to save the day every day.
That is until AI came along. Especially GenAI. Now it’s possible to have technology take a crack at that last mile of unstructured processing. But, we are still at the beginning of that revolution. AI is still in apprenticeship to humans. AI can answer questions asked of it, but can’t frame the right questions. If you ask AI a very complicated question it may give you a satisfying sounding answer…that maybe completely wrong!
“AI is still in apprenticeship to humans”
If you decompose the question then some artful prompt engineering will get you a pleasing and much more reliable response. If you train the AI in a narrow domain then it turns into a specialist savant!
We believe that by helping human SMEs decompose their intricate unstructured data processing work into bite sized questions that need to be answered and then articulate the simple workflows that orchestrate the smaller answers they seek into the larger decisions they make, you can expose the key choke points at which HI and AI can collaborate to create massive productivity.
We’ve built our UDP Platform precisely to enable this collaboration.
AI Operationalized!