As companies increasingly rely on digital technology to drive growth and innovation, the volume of data they collect is also growing at an unprecedented rate. In the first half of this year alone, enterprises produced an average of 1.7 million terabytes of data every day—an astonishing figure that amounts to about a third of all data ever generated in human history. With so much information being collected so fast, businesses need new ways to manage it all quickly and effectively. Thankfully, AI and Big Data are two tools that work well together to improve virtually any organization. Let’s take a look at how these two concepts work together to improve your business.
What is Big Data?
When we talk about big data, we are discussing the large amounts of data that are generated in an organization every day. It is generally unstructured, and it can also be generated by sensor-based devices. There are a couple of sources of big data like log data, unstructured data, social media data, transactional data, email data, and machine-generated data. The four data sources are generated from various devices like sensors, machines, internet of things devices, emails, websites, and social media sites. Data sources vary from user authentication logs to internal emails, website click logs and even sensor data generated from machines. Organizations use data to accurately make predictions, detect frauds and analyse customer behaviour. Big data can be defined as large sets of unstructured data that are processed to extract meaningful information. A great example of this is the way retailers use data to track consumer buying behaviour.
What is AI?
In simple terms, AI is an area of computer science that deals with building machines that can simulate human behaviour, including learning and creative thinking. AI is used to describe machines that are programmed to think like humans, rather than machines that function like computers. What that means in practice is that AI software is designed to solve problems in the same way a human might, rather than executing a sequence of programmed instructions. When you search for a product online, for example, an AI website would be programmed to use natural language to identify exactly what you want, as if a human salesperson were searching for you.
How do AI and Big Data work together?
Big data and AI are two terms that are often used in tandem because of the powerful way they work together. Businesses that use AI and Big Data can expect to experience significant benefits, including improved decision-making capabilities and better insights into their customers. AI and Big Data are used together to collect data and analyse it for insights. Artificial intelligence helps organizations analyse unstructured data, like emails, to discover significant insights that might otherwise go unnoticed. Big data allows AI systems to process larger quantities of information and make more accurate predictions than they could with smaller datasets. Meanwhile, AI can help identify patterns in the data that might otherwise have been overlooked.
Benefits of using AI with Big Data
Improved Customer Experience: AI and Big Data can be used to create a more personal customer experience by predicting customer needs and adapting to their preferences over time. Businesses that use AI can also use data to create more personalized experiences for customers, such as by sending discounts or special offers tailored to each customer’s interests.
Improved Decision-Making Capabilities: AI and Big Data can be used together to make better predictions, from sales projections to the likelihood of certain events occurring.
More Accurate Insights: AI can help extract more meaningful insights from your data by letting you analyse larger quantities of information at once. It can help you identify patterns that might otherwise have been overlooked, allowing you to discover insights that help inform better business decisions.
Drawbacks of using AI with Big Data
System Dependence: AI-based systems are heavily reliant on the data they’re fed, which means that they may not function properly if the data they’re given is inaccurate. This can create problems if you feed unstructured data into AI systems, as they may rely on that data to make decisions.
Ownership Concerns: Let’s say you use AI to analyse your data. That AI system will create insights based on the data it has been fed, but the data is technically owned by the company that collected it. If you want to use those insights, you’ll have to make sure that the owners of that data let you use it.
Privacy Concerns: As with the ownership issue, privacy concerns surrounding data can also pose problems when using AI systems. Ensuring that the data you’re using is properly anonymized to protect individual privacy is critical when using AI.
How can big data be leveraged with AI technology?
The best way to use big data with AI is to sort your data before feeding it to your AI algorithms. You should do the following:
- Get rid of the unstructured data that’s not relevant to your AI algorithms.
- Identify the relevant data and put it in the right format to be fed to your AI algorithms.
- Put the data in the right place so that your AI algorithms can easily access it.
You’ll get a lot more value from your AI algorithms if you do these things.
How AI Works With Big Data to Deliver Insightful Information
The world has been steadily becoming more data-driven, and this trend is only accelerating with the advent of big data. The ever-growing availability of information and the increasing computing power have ensured that every industry from retail to healthcare will be impacted in some way. The information that we have access to, either from the Internet or from our own personal data, is only going to continue to grow in size. With this growth in data comes a need for insights into how it should be analyzed and used to make better business decisions. Artificial intelligence provides a way for us to make sense of all this information by providing insights and wisdom that we would not have access to otherwise. This AI technology has the potential to revolutionize industries like healthcare, education, finance, and marketing.
The Significance of Combining AI and Big Data in Your Business
AI and Big Data are two of the most important technologies in business today, so using them together can be hugely beneficial for your organization. By leveraging both of these technologies, you can transform how your company makes decisions and how it interacts with customers. The only way to truly take advantage of these technologies, though, is to use them together. If you use Big Data but don’t use AI, or vice versa, you’re missing out on the full benefits.