From Data Scavenger Hunt to Data Gold 

Stephen R. Balzac -
From Data Scavenger Hunt to Data Gold 

All data is not created equal. As the amount of data increases exponentially, knowledge workers find themselves overwhelmed with data, struggling to find the useful nuggets they need. The basic questions haven’t changed:  

What data do we have? 
How do I find it? 
What is relevant to me right now?

What has changed is the sheer volume of data available and the variety of places where it can be found.  

Data can be stored in many different places beyond traditional databases: email, Slack, WebEx, Teams, PDF files, MS Office files, and so forth. Digging through months of Slack conversations, years of Confluence pages or, really, any of these different locations is a nightmare all too familiar to everyone who has ever had to find information.  

Whether trying to identify financial fraud, anticipating supply chain disruptions due to an impending storm, or engaging in other time-critical, data intensive activities, the time it takes to find the right data determines the speed of response.  

The data scavenger hunt can easily eat up 7-10 hours a week, or the equivalent of a full day’s work, per person. The problem isn’t just gathering data: knowledge workers need to sort through piles of useless information to identify what is relevant. The cost to businesses is estimated to be in the millions of dollars.  

Search tools can help, but they still require you to search each location separately and they still dump mountains of irrelevant information on you: searching through email, or Slack, or any of these other data repositories can easily generate dozens, if not hundreds, of potential hits. Each one needs to be checked for relevancy. Finding the nuggets of valuable information is—at best—slow, difficult, and error-prone.  

Can AI Find Data Gold? 

Fortunately, AI can be used to find the gold nuggets hidden in the mountains of data. Properly harnessed and directed, AI can scan through and organize search results. Instead of sorting through a mountain of worthless results to find the few gold nuggets, you quickly get the most relevant results. Making this happen, however, requires addressing a few key issues:

  • No hallucinations: Getting relevant results is good. Getting imaginary results is not so good, as the lawyer who famously referenced imaginary court cases quickly learned. AI needs to return results grounded in reality.
  • No data duplication: Large organizations have petabytes of data. Copying all that data into a vector database or vendor cloud storage is slow, expensive, and a potential security nightmare (to say nothing of the problems in synchronizing multiple copies of data).
  • Knowing where to look: The AI needs to automatically search all data sources you have permission to access. This includes databases, email, Slack, WebEx, Confluence, Teams, PDF files, cloud storage, and more.
  • Security: AI needs to integrate with existing security protocols. Adding another security layer only increases complexity and decreases utility.
  • AI and data agnosticism: You should be free to use any approved AI and not worry about the format of the data.

Hitting all of these points is a tall order, but SWIRL does it. 

It’s Not a Hallucination 

SWIRL enables the modern enterprise to securely leverage AI to unlock their data and dramatically boost productivity.  

SWIRL uses any approved AI to talk to virtually any data store, giving you access to all of your data—including data you didn’t know about (provided you are authorized to access it). SWIRL follows a zero-trust security model, eliminating the need for data migration and instead enabling AI systems to connect directly with source systems safely within the corporate firewall. Data remains secure in your data repositories.  

SWIRL’s innovative approach to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) does not require a vector database, eliminating the need for large scale data duplication. SWIRL’s approach grounds results in facts, so you can say goodbye to AI hallucinations. SWIRL organizes results by relevancy to the original query, providing you results you can use—and trust—quickly, without needing to spend hours wading through piles of irrelevancy.  

With SWIRL, turn your data scavenger hunt into gold: fast, accurate, relevant AI-enhanced insights from your enterprise data.  


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