Today, large enterprises are grappling with an onslaught of unstructured data and documents. IDC and Seagate predict that the global data sphere will grow to 163 zettabytes by 2025, and about 80 percent of that will be unstructured. In regulated industries, such as financial services, the challenges posed by unstructured and semi-structured data are exponentially higher. Traditional methods–ranging from manual entry to Optical Character Recognition (OCR)–have proved woefully inadequate. Even more recent and highly heralded methods such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have proven to be piecemeal solutions to the challenge.

Across the enterprise ecosystem, employees are building a bottomless data lake, premised on the corporate mantra to "save everything, just in case," according to an article published in Gartner. Alan Dayley, a former research director at Gartner, notes that increased data growth over the past decade has created an unstructured data nightmare. "It's not just the cost to store it. Huge volumes of dark data make it harder to find what is useful and may mean we miss business opportunities," says Dayley. Mike Gualtieri, VP and principal analyst at Forrester notes in an article that between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics.