I’m long on data.
And by that, I mean I believe the data in organizations, particularly regulated ones, is undervalued today. The tangible value and the tremendous future potential aren’t even accounted for, let alone be captured in most companies.
And most of that data is unstructured, which pretty much means anything not in a spreadsheet or database. Think text, audio, video, machine-generated data, log files, etc. Structured data had plenty of tools, frameworks, and even entire programming languages like SQL. Unstructured data, however, largely relies on someone manually looking at and interpreting it to get value or take action.
Looking at most stats and data trends, the vast majority of business data today is unstructured and growing much faster than organized and more easily utilized structured data. This all leads to a vast trove of potential insights sitting without an analysis or other use.
AI provides the unlock of the value in that data and the ability to supercharge your service levels.
Emmet Shear, founded of Twitch, offers an example use case of how AI can use unstructured data to provide value and solve problems that aren’t even planned or designed into a product or service.
Yelp. It’s like a big database that has a bunch of rows and rows. It’s like restaurants and local businesses, and they have a bunch of facts about them, like where they are located and what are their hours. All in that database row, and it’s all text.
AI has opened up the possibility for a huge inversion. What if the thing you did was just gave us just a video of your meal? And then, an AI watched it and extracted a version of that was metadata. If we decide something else is important, like noise levels. Just go back and tell the AI, “Also, grab noise collection levels from all of these videos .”Then I can run a search, and there are these 15 restaurants, and I’m like, oh, actually sort by noise level.
Thinking through how you could wildly improve your customers’ experience is a start. What are the things that would be possible if you had the signal, trigger, or context that would enable you to have the exact right solution to their urgent and important problem?
Maybe it’s the financing options for the new business they’ve been thinking about. The ability to go to school for a family member? Or go back to school and still provide for their family? Replace an unreliable car? Or buy an additional vehicle for a new driver?
This is just a short list of opportunities to be a trusted advisor and partner your customers’ major financial decisions. A well-time and executed offer of assistance, from someone you trust is vastly more welcome and valued than a bland, generic offer from even a lower-cost provider.
Your data is the key to breaking out of the ordinary. And the best part is, you already have it in your hands.