The many challenges of unstructured data

Close your eyes and imagine: Contracts revised. Emails exchanged. PDFs uploaded. Presentations, policies, reports, and transcripts flowing through your systems. Every day, the volume of unstructured content in your organization grows. It’s a never-ending expansion—thousands of new files, scattered across tools and teams, with little oversight.

But growth alone isn’t the problem. It’s what happens after those files are created.

Most of this content enters the enterprise blind. No tags. No owners. No policies. No understanding of what’s sensitive, outdated or duplicative. And once a file slips into that untagged void, it becomes dark data that’s invisible to your systems, unusable by your teams and potentially risky to your compliance efforts.

That invisibility comes at a cost. When unstructured data lacks metadata and governance, it can’t be reliably searched, surfaced or used to train AI. Duplicate or outdated versions of documents create noise. Manual trackers and spreadsheet-based cataloging fall apart at scale. The result is confusion and inefficiency between teams trying to do the right thing with the wrong tools.

Invisible data is a liability

For AI specifically, this is a major bottleneck. Generative AI use cases don’t just require large volumes of content. They require continuously updated, high-quality content that’s easy to trace, interpret and control. If your content pipelines are messy, so are your model outputs.

The challenge grows under the weight of compliance demands. Sensitive data—personally identifiable information (PII), financial disclosures, health records or even internal assessments—can easily get buried in unstructured files. Without automated classification and control, you’re left relying on manual tagging or post-hoc audits. Both are expensive and error-prone, and they’re too slow for the pace of AI or your business.

According to Forrester, only 16% of unstructured data is prioritized. It’s a stark indicator of how much value is being lost to disorganization and manual effort.3

The reality is it’s an IT problem and a strategic gap that limits your organization’s ability to innovate, comply and scale AI safely. And the longer it goes unaddressed, the harder it becomes to fix.

Our solution begins by solving these core challenges at scale, automatically and across your entire ecosystem.

16%

58% of enterprise data is unstructured, but only 16% of firms prioritize it. ³

Who’s responsible for governing unstructured data in your org?

AI operations
Data governance/CDO
IT
Compliance/Risk
No one

³Source: Forrester. Predictions 2024: Data and Analytics (Oct 2023)