Unstructured Data Analysis With AI

This data was originally featured in the August 7th, 2024 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, August 7, 2024: Generative AI All or Nothing, Unstructured Data Analysis with AI

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about a use case for generative AI that very few people think about: generation of quantitative data.

Now, before we proceed, I want to be clear we are doing what’s essentially a summarization task. We’re not asking AI to make net new data out of whole cloth. It can do that, but you probably shouldn’t under most circumstances.

No, instead we’re talking about turning unstructured data like text or images into structured data.

What kind of structured data? Pretty much anything you can think of. For example, take this social media post:

Black Forest Labs’ Flux model came out last week, and it’s incredible. And it runs on your laptop. It’s head and shoulders better than similar-sized models and competitive with the big paid services. It’s good enough that many of its images will pass casual inspection as “real”, like the one on this post. Gone are the days of obvious artifacts like a person with 13 fingers on one hand. Detection is getting harder. And by extension, if detection of AI content is getting harder, then the quality of AI content is improving. After all, if you can detect it easily, it’s probably also not great quality.

What could you do with this piece of unstructured text? You could count things like the number of characters, words, or sentences, sure.

You could also do things like judge readability. Sentiment. Tone. Formality of writing. Writing style. Named entities. Topics. Themes. That’s all text analytics.

What would you do with that information? This is where classical AI would step in, things that generative AI models can’t do (because it’s complex math). You might take your social media posts and their performance, have a generative model create different text analytics, and then run a regression analysis to ask, “What, if any, text features correlate with higher social post performance?”

One of the biggest challenges marketers face is understanding WHY something is working. We have basic measurements to know broadly what worked, but it’s rarely clear if it’s working because of something we did or something beyond our control.

If we use the power of generative AI tools to generate data that would otherwise take enormous amounts of time, we can better analyze the outcomes with the methods and understand what, if any, effect our efforts have.

For example, Katie and I were looking at our content recently, and we used generative AI to score every piece of content we’ve created over 6 years against our Ideal Customer Profile, our ICP. How much, on a scale of 0-100, would our ICP find any given blog post, newsletter, podcast, or livestream useful? What we found was fascinating:

By using generative AI to create the data from the unstructured data we already have, we can judge whether our content marketing strategy is effective. And thankfully, ever since we started being laser focused on content that our ideal customer profile – you – want, we’ve seen our scores go up.

What text data do you have on hand that you wish you could analyze further? Unleash the power of generative AI on it and see what your data has to tell you.

And of course, shameless plug, if you want someone to do this for you, we’re happy to help.

Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.