When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn Unstructured data can be very valuable to a business in many different kinds of scenarios. It can help organizations discover new insights by analyzing data that isn't stored in a relational database. Unstructured data is often a treasure trove of helpful information when it is harnessed and used in the right ways.
First of all, most business data is unstructured. Structured data has already been carefully collected and groomed to be stored in a relational database. Unstructured data is raw and stored in a data lake. It includes valuable information contained in email and text messages, rich media, sensor outputs and server logs.
One big reason that companies are moving toward using unstructured data is that object storage and automation makes the analysis of unstructured data much more accessible. Speech-to-text technology can turn verbal communications into text resources that can be effectively mined. By combining the power of AI/ML and speech-to-text, businesses can get a wide range of surprising results with various uses of unstructured data.
The power to do this is profound now – just think about all of the ambient data that exists in somebody's email inbox, or the text messaging threads on their smartphone. To the extent that labor-saving AI/ML applications can gather and analyze unstructured data from text files and documents allows businesses to dig into mountains of useful data that can change how businesses operate in a big way.
