AI & DATA
Gun fight at the Data Corral The Wild West of data is about to be won, according to Philip Dodds, Chief Technology Officer, and Pamela Pecs Cytron, Founder and CEO, of Pendo Systems Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid may be legendary, but even their infamous ability to evade capture pales into insignificance compared to the slippery nature of unstructured data. As with the two outlaws, it’s the unruly nature of information that lies outside of the norm, which makes it difficult to identify and track down. It also has the biggest bounty on its head. That’s the view of Philip Dodds, chief technology officer, and Pamela Pecs Cytron, founder and CEO, of Pendo Systems. Their company is one of the frontline marshalls, identifying and corralling dark data, then passing it on to be processed by artificial intelligence (AI) that can apply narrative science to the information. By sifting, it can turn these wanton elements into the prospect of pure gold when it comes to customer insight and predictive banking.
Last February, Pendo Systems released Version 4.0 of the Pendo Machine Learning Platform, which makes unstructured data AI-ready using, among other tools, optical character recognition (OCR) and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques. The platform enables organisations to quickly and easily identify all missing documents and cluster them, based on precise requirements, as well as making suggestions to help recover other relevant documents and data. Perhaps its most exciting feature, though, is the capacity to be trained by the human beings working with it, to continually evolve their data understanding, management, storage and business decisioning processes without the need for input from IT departments. With that, of course, comes considerable cost and resource savings. Dodds explains: “We started with machine learning [and] realised that this, on its own, couldn’t get the 95-98 per cent accuracy we were looking for. So, we combined it with rule-based systems, with highly interactive, iterative processes, to
allow us to constantly train not only the algorithms, but also people, into understanding how to harness this Wild West world of data that’s sitting out there in the unstructured space.”
A golden opportunity Dismissing that chaotic cyberspace of unstructured data as a legacy problem is missing the point, he says. As firms’ unstructured data mountains continue to develop, so must the industry and the systems it uses to keep up. “People tended to think about unstructured data as an historical problem... [but] this kind of data doesn’t go away. About 80 per cent of the data in an organisation today is really in an unstructured form. It hasn’t been IT managed, it hasn’t been put in a database. “We see unstructured as another capability that a data-aware organisation should be able to have,” says Dodds. Ensuring that data is trustworthy is equally important, adds Pecs Cytron. “One of the biggest challenges is really understanding where the data is coming from and if it’s accurate, to support the increasing trend
In its sights: The Pendo platform hunts down and brings unruly data to account
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