The world’s current output of data is roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes a day. So, imagine, employees in a financial organization trying to use the tools of just five years ago to deal with a fraction of this data. To identify fraud, they would have to hire thousands of analysts to mine unprocessed data in broker submissions and claim documents. Then, they would need to create tax evasion insights out of unstructured information from bank statements and insurance loss run reports. It’s beyond human capacity to absorb today’s big data quickly enough to make enterprise-scale decisions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the rescue

A solution emerges from new technology: cognitive intelligence engines fueled by AI, neural networks, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP). AI automatically sorts information that is too illogical for computers to make sense of—digital documents, social media posts, and even Internet of Things (IoT) notifications. Then, together with NLP, it decides what is relevant, delivering actionable business insights based on a deep analysis of the extracted information.

In most organizations, unstructured data is like the proverbial white elephant; ignoring it can lead to errors and inaccurate inferences, but using it may not offer clear patterns to enhance decision-making. However, smart machine learning algorithms can glean meaning from vast amounts of unstructured data and can route questions to specific AI modules, helping organizations address the most complex business challenges. This provides a valuable level of automation that can be used to process the approximately 80% of an organizations’ data that is unstructured.

What this means for businesses in 2018 and beyond

Enterprises are already seeing the benefits of smart technology platforms that enable faster and more effective access to data insights by combining semantic analytics and image processing to intelligently extract information from disparate sources. The value of this sophistication is clear. By 2020, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), organizations that analyze all relevant structured and unstructured data can gain $430 billion in productivity over competitors that do not.

If you think technology this smart must be difficult to use, hard to deploy, or expensive, think again. It is not only proving to be intuitive, but it is also cutting time and costs. What’s more, the transformation of manual processes to straight-through processes is enabling businesses to make the right decisions at the right time.

This will impact the role financial advisors play in financial organizations. Smart technologies like AI will help free them from spending time answering mundane questions to focusing more on the nuances of financial planning, where their expertise can add real value. This aligns perfectly with millennials’ expectations of getting quick responses to queries. Smart new technologies can help them there, reserving the in-depth knowledge of financial advisors for discussing long-term goals and strategies.

Successful companies of the future must use cognitive intelligence to influence nearly every aspect of decision-making. They will also apply these insights in other ways: engaging with their customers through personalized experiences and exploring newer business models that leverage the potential of place, time and device-agnostic computing capabilities. Cognitive intelligence engines allow organizations to decipher all unstructured data and find patterns within it at unprecedented speeds, enabling business decisions at the speed of insight, edging out competitors, and driving customer delight.

So, does our financial company example above have to drop its legacy arsenal to win? The happy answer is no. Intelligent systems work with existing systems. That company would probably choose an on-site installation to stay in control of data privacy and protection, but for the others, there’s always the Cloud.

This point of view article originally published on WealthManagement.com has been shared by Dinesh Venugopal, President – Mphasis Direct and Digital. WealthManagement.com is the market-leading news and analysis hub for the wealth management community that drives real marketing results. It provides investment ideas, insight and analysis to help advisors and wealth management professionals grow their business.

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