The second question includes irrelevant data and, to make things worse, includes both Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures. This question illustrates why unstructured data is more difficult to analyze quickly.

Now, imagine a programmable computer trying to extract meaning from billions of data like this! What kind of program would someone write that could sort out every eventuality among the clutter? How would someone build a long enough list of keywords to find anything useful? Unstructured data hides answers to disease prevention, criminal activity, stock markets—almost every aspect of civilization today. Without those answers, people and organizations cannot make useful predictions or recommendations.

But AI can shed light on unstructured data! AI uses new kinds of computing—some modeled on the human brain—to rapidly give dark data structure, and from it, make new discoveries. AI can even learn things—by itself—from the data it manages and teach itself how to make better predictions over time. This is the Era of AI, and it changes everything!