Managing unstructured data is crucial to enterprises' AI goals

For CenturyLink, customer surveys play an important role in understanding the customer experience. But, in the past, without the ability to analyze the unstructured data in these surveys, customer service teams couldn't drill down to identify the nature and characteristics of issues. "Using unstructured data is really important for us because that's where the real detail -- the meat -- comes in," said Beth Ard, vice president of customer experience at the Louisiana-based network services provider. "When you do scoring, for example, you don't have enough actionable insight to make the changes that you need without it." Most business analytics processes require clean and well-structured data, but enterprises are increasingly managing unstructured data formats -- emails, chat transcripts, audio and video, and social media posts.