The Next Big Thing in artificial intelligence » strategy

This story originally appeared in the October 2019 issue of strategy. In recent years, every sector, from finance to QSR, has amassed and aggregated data from various sources to uncover themes around unmet consumer needs, says Meghan Nameth, managing director for customer marketing and product analytics at PwC. But identifying patterns within defined sets of structured data is "actually the easy part of AI," notes Anne-Marie Castonguay, who heads up data and insights at Lg2. Now, the next big thing is deciphering unstructured data, such as documents, audio, video, social chatter and product reviews, which are usually qualitative in nature and far more difficult to parse. Machine learning algorithms typically use structured data – clearly defined data types that can be easily categorized, stored and searched in a database – to function.