Information Capital: The Structured Data Opportunity

As technology continues to reshape our world, a new paradigm forgoing traditional economic fundamentals has emerged, with data at its core.
Pivotal in seeding future value and reshaping business dynamics in the AI era, data is the unfair advantage enabling exponential growth and parabolic moves in productivity for AI-enabled businesses everywhere.

The New Factors of Production

Information Capital: Deployable Data, the new bedrock of value creation
Social Capital: A fusion of ethics and reputation
Human Capital: Still vital, but increasingly augmented by AI and streamlined processes
Financial Capital: While still important, its primacy is diminishing due to technological advancements
Entrepreneurship: Human vision remains integral in creating design and driving innovation

This shift presents an unprecedented opportunity for businesses, institutions, and societies to harness the power of organized information. While data has long been recognized as a valuable asset, the rise of structured data as an information class is reshaping traditional business dynamics.
Structured data - information that is organized and formatted in a defined way - with its nimble, malleable and easily queryable format, is an essential asset, capable of driving innovation, productivity, efficiency, profitability and growth across sectors.
Organizations stand to benefit from increased momentum, the ability to tailor products and service delivery making them more customer-centric, and the ensuing rise in sentiment which amplifies their competitive position.

The Foundation: Structured Data as an Equalizer

For companies and countries that may have missed the initial wave of digital transformation and the petabytes of useful data it resulted in, structured data presents a unique opportunity to catch up. By leveraging AI to rapidly organize and analyze information, businesses can:

Rapidly build valuable datasets
Gain insights comparable to those of more digitally mature competitors
Make data-driven decisions without years of digital infrastructure investment
Leapfrog qualitative benchmarks cost-effectively in minimal time.

This is a limited window of opportunity which can drastically increase current standing and future competitiveness .

Structured Data as Information Capital

Structured data’s potential ripples beyond the organization of information; It’s a catalyst for bringing offline, real-world artifacts into the digital realm, enriching available information, and enabling a multitude of expressions and possibilities for the resultant datasets.

Data as a Capacity-Building Resource

Enhanced Model Training: Structured data serves as high-quality input for AI models, leading to more accurate and reliable outputs
Faster Learning Curves: AI systems can process and learn from structured data more efficiently
Improved Interpretability: Structured data allows for better understanding and explanation of AI decision-making processes
Cross-Domain Applications: Structured data facilitates the transfer of learnings from one domain to another

Data-driven Innovation & Productivity

Ecosystem Creation: Businesses built on structured data can more easily create platforms and ecosystems that enable other businesses to thrive. For example, structured financial data has allowed for the creation of fintech platforms that empower a multitude of smaller financial service providers.
API Economy: Structured data facilitates the creation of robust APIs, allowing businesses to offer their data and services as building blocks for other applications. This not only creates new revenue streams but also spurs innovation across industries.
Cross-Industry Insights: When data is well-structured, insights from one industry can more easily be applied to others, leading to unexpected innovations and productivity gains.
Democratization of AI/ML: Structured data lowers the barrier to entry for AI and machine learning applications, allowing smaller businesses and startups to leverage advanced analytics and create innovative products.

Data Portability and the New Competitive Landscape

Structured data can introduce a level of portability that challenges the traditional notion of data-based moats, to the benefit of the customer:

Reduced Lock-in: Unlike unstructured or proprietary data formats, structured data can more easily be migrated between different systems or platforms. This reduces vendor lock-in and empowers users and businesses to choose the best tools for their needs.
Continuous Innovation Imperative: The portability of structured data means that businesses can no longer rely solely on network effects to retain users. They must continually innovate and provide value to prevent churn. This dynamic fosters a more competitive and innovative market.
Interoperability: Structured data facilitates better interoperability between different systems and platforms. This can lead to the creation of more comprehensive and powerful solutions that ingest and combine data from multiple sources.
User Empowerment: As users gain more control over their data, they can demand better services and more tailored experiences, pushing businesses to constantly improve their offerings.

The Road Ahead: How do we get there?

Mckinsey’s article Charting a path to the data- and AI-driven enterprise of 2030 speaks of the need, and challenges associated with transitioning to structured data:

Creating value from unstructured data is a much bigger and more time-intensive effort than many realize. Significant challenges include cleansing and tagging requirements, privacy and bias concerns, skyrocketing cloud storage and networking costs, and often expensive conversion processes. Data leaders will need to invest in building new capabilities such as natural-language processing to help convert the unstructured data so that LLMs can “understand” and use it.

Bespoke solutions for transforming data to a structured state have historically been cost-prohibitive, time-consuming and resource-intensive.
By applying AI-based capabilities to industry-specific problems, we can start structuring unstructured data rapidly and unlocking its latent potential.

At Anomaly, we think long and hard about what the future might look like, what we want it to look like, and our stance on the subject at hand.
While mulling Jobs in the Age of AI, an underserved segment with immediate impact surfaced. Despite networked systems, most of the world's talent uses resumes - digital replicas of paper-based professional qualifications - to seek jobs. These sit in unstructured form with no ubiquitous system to structure them, no marketplace to serve them, and no system to track the development of what are effectively digital personas.

Skygate: Applying Structured Data to Recruitment

We built Skygate, an intelligent document processing platform, to enable recruiters and large employers to structure, edit, format, and store or port candidate data. Recruitment teams can access the following AI-powered benefits today:

Supercharge Recruitment

Increased Throughput: Process more candidates in less time, expanding your talent pool.
Improved Quality: Surface better-matched candidates by comparing and analyzing structured resume data.
Enhanced Accessibility: Connect more people to opportunities by efficiently processing and matching skills to job requirements.
Reduced Bias: Standardize candidate evaluation, promoting fairness and diversity in hiring.

Operational Efficiencies

Improved Accuracy: Minimize human error in data entry and analysis.
Rapid Turnaround: Dramatically reduce time-to-hire with automated data processing.
Cost Effectiveness: Lower the unit cost of candidate processing and evaluation.
Scalability: Easily handle increased recruitment volumes without proportional increases in resources.

Privacy and Data Security

In-House Processing: Keep sensitive information within your own systems, reducing exposure to third-party risks.
Granular Control: Easily manage access to specific data points, enhancing overall data governance.
Compliance Simplification: Streamline adherence to data protection regulations with well-organized, easily auditable data.

Data Portability & Collaborative Workflows

Open Standards: Supports universal JSON and CSV data formats. You decide where to keep your data.
Cloud Data: Serves as a secure cloud database for small teams without a data pipeline
One Subscription: Supports unlimited seat usage with a single subscription to encourage collaboration.

To learn more about Skygate, please visit www.getskygate.com or www.skygate.network.

Beyond Recruitment: Wider Applications

Business Intelligence: Generate deeper insights from structured customer and operational data, enabling more accurate forecasting and strategic decision-making.
Product Development: Use structured feedback and usage data to inform product iterations, leading to faster development cycles and products that better meet customer needs.
Supply Chain Optimization: Enhance inventory management and logistics with structured data from multiple sources, reducing costs and improving efficiency.
Healthcare: Improve patient outcomes through structured medical records and research data, enabling personalized treatment plans and more effective population health management.
Education: Personalize learning experiences using structured data on student performance and preferences, leading to improved educational outcomes and more engaging learning experiences.

As with all waves of technology, adoption rates for AI-enabled transformation will vary and be unevenly distributed across geographies. The question isn’t whether structured data will reshape industries, but how quickly organizations will adapt to harness its power.

Vision, ethos and adaptability will likely be the defining traits of the next generation of popular enterprises, with structured data underpinning them.

By structuring human capital data today, organizations are laying the foundation for a more efficient, equitable, and innovative tomorrow.
Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your data and your workforce? Visit www.getskygate.com to start your journey towards a data-empowered future.