Unstructured Data

Unstructured data is everything a company knows that does not fit a schema: documents, emails, chat threads, recordings, notes.

Structured data is the part companies have been good at for decades. A CRM knows the deal size and the close date. What it does not hold is why the deal nearly fell over in March, which lives in a thread, a call recording and a document nobody linked to the record. That is the majority of what a company knows and almost none of what its systems can query.

What changed is not that this material became accessible — search has existed for a long time — but that it became interpretable. A model can read a thread and extract the commitment in it. The remaining problem is knowing which thread matters, which is a question about relationships and currency rather than about reading.

Frequently Asked Questions

Search finds documents. It does not tell you which of two conflicting ones is current, who owns the decision, or how a conversation relates to the record it changed.