From dark data to bright insights: How AI agents make data simple

Imagine having a conversation with all of your organization's data - every document, spreadsheet, email, image, and video - as easily as asking a question to a knowledgeable colleague. Now stop imagining, because this isn't science fiction. While enterprises today can typically access only 10% of their data, AI agents are about to unlock the other ~90% of data that is unstructured. This presents an incredible opportunity for organizations to fuel AI with data they may not be able to access today.*.

The challenge is twofold. Beyond that inaccessible 90% of data lying dormant in documents, images, and audio files, even the available 10% requires scarce data experts to analyze and interpret it. This creates a significant bottleneck in data-driven decision making - one that's about to disappear.

AI agents are the breakthrough we've been waiting for. Unlike general-purpose language models that simply engage in broad conversation, these purpose-built digital workers combine specialized capabilities with deep integration into your data systems. They can autonomously explore your data landscape, understand business context, and deliver insights directly to users in their preferred workflows - no data expertise required.

It's like having a data analyst who never sleeps. When you have a question, instead of calling one of those few data professionals, you can actually talk to a data agent who's doing the same steps - understanding what you're looking for, doing the analysis, and giving it back to you in an understandable form.

The Evolution of Enterprise Data

The journey here has been remarkable. We started in what I'll call the primitive era, where data was simple but limited. Most businesses relied on basic structured information in spreadsheets and databases, set up to answer specific known business questions. While manageable, this data only captured a tiny fraction of potentially available insights.

Then came the age of "big data," marked by an explosion in both volume and complexity. Organizations built elaborate data warehouses and data lakes, accumulated vast amounts of information, hoping skilled experts would turn that data into gold. Instead, they found themselves drowning in data while starving for insights.

Now, we're entering an era of multimodal data simplicity, where all types of data are captured. Hearing, seeing and sensing the world through video, audio, speech, text, PDFs and more. The era of multimodal data is supported by multimodal Gen AI that brings to bear the tools needed to unlock this variety of datasets and get to insights that truly represent the world around us.

Real Impact, Right Now

While this evolution might sound theoretical, it's already delivering real business impact across industries. Consider Volkswagen Group of America's myVW Virtual Assistant, which sifts through technical manuals, FAQs, and visual data to help drivers diagnose issues through natural conversation. This isn't just a chatbot - it's a specialized system that understands the relationships between different types of vehicle data and can interpret everything from warning lights to maintenance schedules.

HCA Healthcare demonstrates another powerful application. By unifying diverse healthcare information - from medical records to imaging data to research papers - through AI agents, they've created a system that delivers relevant insights to clinicians at the point of care. This isn't just about efficiency; it's about enabling better medical decisions through comprehensive data access.

Breaking Free from Dashboard Constraints

Traditional dashboards got us this far, but they're no longer enough. While they've been our primary window into enterprise data, the reality is stark: organizations have thousands of unused or stale dashboards, created for one-time questions and then forgotten. We need a better way.

This is where AI agents truly shine. Instead of requiring business users to navigate complex dashboards or wait for analyst support, AI agents deliver insights directly within existing workflows - whether in email, chat, or any business application. Business users should not have to check static dashboards with pre-defined metrics. Information should find its way to where you are, rather than requiring you to kick out to a different tool and then try to translate it back into your context.

The Data Value Flywheel

Here's where things get really interesting. When organizations bring together diverse data signals and make them accessible to the whole team, they often discover hidden patterns that weren't visible before. These insights enable the creation of better services and customer experiences, which in turn generate more data signals - creating what we call the "real-time data flywheel."

The very essence of data-driven value generation is surprisingly simple. The more data signals you can bring together, the more you find hidden patterns in your data. These patterns enable you to build better services and models, which generate more data for you, creating a continuous cycle of improvement.

It's not about big data anymore - it's about "wide data." Leading organizations are discovering that when they bring together customer data, sales data, service data, and social media data into unified records, they uncover patterns that would remain invisible in siloed systems. These insights drive new services and innovations, continuing to feed the flywheel of improvement.

Looking Ahead

For data leaders, the time to act is now. The impact of AI agents goes far beyond making existing processes more efficient - they're democratizing data access across organizations. Instead of relying on specialized data teams to unlock insights, every employee can now have meaningful conversations with your organization's data. And with AI agents able to tap into the 90% of data that's been sitting in the dark, these conversations will unlock entirely new possibilities.

The question isn't whether to embrace this change, but how quickly you can make it happen. By bringing together the accessibility of AI agents with the power of unified data platforms, you can finally turn your dark data into bright insights - and use those insights to drive unprecedented value for your customers and your business.

*https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/charting-a-path-to-the-data-and-ai-driven-enterprise-of-2030