AI thrives on data. But most enterprise data remains unstructured and ungoverned. In 2026, that will no longer be sustainable.
From emails to videos to call transcripts, unstructured data holds immense potential. The thing is that without governance, it’s a liability. Expect to see companies invest heavily in data discovery, classification and lineage solutions to understand what they have, where it lives and how it can be used safely.
Organizations that fail to govern unstructured data risk feeding their models unreliable or non-compliant inputs, and that undermines accuracy, transparency and trust in your models and your capacity to deliver on your AI roadmap. It also leaves significant value on the table; the richest signals for more accurate, context-aware and impactful AI often lives in unstructured data. And if the models don’t include it, organizations can’t benefit from it.
