Where did I leave that data? AI Data Concierges to the Rescue
The recent leaps forward in AI are impacting every way that work is being done. From helping write business documents, to authoring code, to helping you search the web, every day brings new applications for this exciting technology. Now AI is here to be your personal data concierge, helping you find the data assets your business has hidden in its darkest corners so you can leverage them in your work.
Traditional Data Discovery is broken
Data Discovery has historically been a very manual, human-driven task. Most large companies have data stored across disparate systems and locations. There’s rarely a single record of all the data a firm possesses, has purchased, or even just evaluated, forget about an easy way to browse it all. The most sophisticated data-driven companies employ teams of people that play switchboard operator, taking in requests for information from business users across the globe, researching if and where that information exists, and then letting the requestor know where they can find it. It’s a time intensive process and often a very frustrating one. The connections made between business problems and data are only as good as the memories of the humans playing operator.
What makes Data Discovery a particularly challenging problem is the fact that data requests are extremely nuanced. Take a request for“ Healthcare Data” for example. One request may be looking for information on adoption of certain Medicare plans while another may need data on how long people are typically out of work after certain accidents. These two requests are for very different types of data, and seeing descriptions or even samples of a dataset is likely not enough information to answer the question. So how can AI help?
AI Data Concierge to the rescue
Modern AI does an excellent job of analyzing large corpuses of text and extracting meaning from them. If you had a dataset listing every data asset your company owned and/or created along with a list of every use case for the data, AI would be able to go through it all in seconds to produce significant insights and point you in the right direction. The challenge is that companies don’t have that key dataset to power these Data Concierges, until now.
Late last year Nomad Data launched its data concierge product to help solve this exact challenge. Employees can simply chat with Data Concierge, asking it to help locate specific types of data to solve challenging problems as well as answer questions related to your company’s history with that data, from meetings about it to purchase information. So how is it powered?
In order to complete its task, Data Concierge requires a stream of information on these datasets including very detailed information on how they can be used and the specific problems they can solve. Fortunately, Nomad Data’s data marketplace of over 2,600 global data vendors and thousands of data inquiries serves this exact purpose. As hundreds of firms search for data from all over the globe, data vendors are logging in to the Nomad Data platform and constantly providing new details on what products they have and whether their data is relevant to very specific use cases. By coupling all this information with details on the data itself, this dataset can also be used to infer uses for new data assets.
Nomad's Data Concierge continues to get smarter
As Nomad Data’s global network continues to grow, this core dataset continues to learn more and more about global data assets. Information trained on this feed is combined with data from a user’s company to produce ever more accurate information to help companies locate their data assets.
As the pace of AI innovation continues to grow, the market will develop new ways to assist workers in doing more. The days of rote, repetitive knowledge work are coming to an end. AI will enable employees to focus on the highest value-add activities which will increase overall company productivity but also make work more interesting for the multitudes engaging in this type of work.
