What is Unstructured Data?

“90 Percent of the Big Data We Generate Is an Unstructured Mess” - PC Mag

“80 to 90 percent of data generated and collected by organizations, is unstructured” - MongoDB

“Big Data and unstructured data often go together. Unstructured data comprises the vast majority of data found in an organization.” - Merrill Lynch

“Volumes are growing rapidly — many times faster than the rate of growth for structured databases. The global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes by 2025 and the majority of that will be unstructured.” - IDC and Seagate

Most data is not organized in a pre-defined way. We call this data unstructured, because it lacks a useful organizational structure. Without a useful organizational structure, your data is probably not going to do you much good. You can think of unstructured data as a house without an address: the house might be nice, but no one is going to use it if they don’t know where it is.

Where is all of this unstructured data coming from?

Broadly speaking, there are two different sources of unstructured data: There is unstructured data generated by people, and unstructured data that is generated by machines.

Digital photos, audio, and video files are some of the most common types of unstructured data that we create in our daily lives. This data is sometimes private, it’s sometimes shared on social media channels, photo sharing sites and YouTube. It's sometimes created by professional media and entertainment organizations. Many business documents are also unstructured, such as records and invoices.

There is also a huge amount of unstructured data that is machine generated. Scientific data, digital surveillance, satellite imagery, geo-spatial data, weather data and various types of sensor data are all generated automatically by machines.

Modern organizations are inundated with unstructured data because both people and machines are prolific creators of digital content:

• Human‑generated sources: smartphone photos, customer reviews, chat transcripts, emails, audio recordings and social media posts. With more than 5 billion people using the internet, the deluge of unstructured content grows every second. Enterprises often pull from hundreds of data sources – an average of 400 per organization – which means content arrives in different formats and may be duplicated or out‑of‑date.
  
  
• Machine‑generated sources: internet‑of‑things (IoT) sensors, autonomous vehicles, CCTV cameras, weather satellites, scientific instruments and industrial control systems. This machine data is expanding rapidly; IoT devices and edge computing solutions alone are expected to generate over 73 zettabytes of data in 2025.
  
  

The sheer volume of data is staggering. Analysts estimate that the global datasphere stood at 149 zettabytes in 2024 and will reach 181 zettabytes in 2025. Research suggests that 80 % of enterprise data is unstructured and that the volume of unstructured data is growing three times faster than structured data. Unstructured content therefore dominates our digital universe.

Table 1 – Common sources of unstructured data

Framework: capturing unstructured data

A useful way to think about unstructured data ingestion is to break the process into stages:

1. Discovery – Identify all repositories where unstructured content resides (file shares, cloud drives, email archives, data lakes).
   
   
2. Cataloguing and metadata extraction – Collect basic metadata (creator, date, size, format) and tag each file for easier search.
   
   
3. Classification – Use automated classifiers or AI models to determine content type (image vs. text vs. audio) and identify sensitive fields.
   
   
4. Storage and access management – Place data into scalable storage (object stores or data lakes) with appropriate access controls.
   
   
5. Processing and analytics – Apply AI/ML models to transform content into structured insights (e.g., OCR for scanned documents, speech‑to‑text for audio).
   
   
6. Governance and lifecycle management – Enforce retention policies, deduplicate stale files and remove redundant copies to reduce risk.
   
   

Expert insights

• Unstructured data dominates enterprise content – Gartner estimates that 80 % of enterprise data is unstructured. Research from Encord puts the figure even higher (80 – 90 %) and notes that unstructured data grows three times faster than structured data.
  
  
• Data volumes are exploding – The global datasphere reached 149 zettabytes in 2024 and is projected to grow to 181 zettabytes by 2025. IoT devices alone are expected to generate over 73 zettabytes in 2025.
  
  
• Data is spread across many sources – Organizations typically ingest data from around 400 distinct sources, complicating consolidation and quality control.
  
  

Expert commentary

Analysts repeatedly warn that unstructured data sprawl is a growing risk. A 2024 Market Pulse Survey found that 71 % of enterprises struggle to manage and protect unstructured data. Without proper governance, 21 % of all data remains completely unprotected and 54 % of company data is stale, exposing organizations to compliance and security issues. Industry experts advise creating comprehensive data catalogs and applying AI‑driven classification to reduce these risks.

Quick summary

• What is unstructured data? Unstructured data refers to information that doesn’t follow a fixed schema. It comes from people (photos, emails, social media) and machines (sensors, video, scientific instruments).
  
  
• Why is it important? Roughly 80–90 % of enterprise data is unstructured and this volume is growing fast. Turning these raw files into structured knowledge is a major challenge and a major opportunity.
  
  

The AI solution

Unstructured data comes in many formats, and it’s a real challenge for conventional software to ingest, process, and analyze. This lack of organization results in irregularities and ambiguities that have made this kind of data useless for companies using conventional approaches to data analysis. Lack of consistent internal structure doesn’t conform to what typical data mining systems can work with.

With the help of AI and machine learning, new tools are emerging that can search through vast quantities of unstructured data to uncover beneficial and actionable business intelligence. AI-powered technology like Clarifai’s Spacetime visual search functions at near real-time speed and custom training can automatically identify the patterns and insights they uncover in unstructured data. In effect, these AI systems can help you transform unstructured data into structured data.

Expanding the AI landscape

Artificial intelligence excels at recognizing patterns in images, text, speech and video. Different AI techniques are applied depending on the data type:

• Text data (NLP): natural language processing techniques like tokenization, sentiment analysis, named‑entity recognition and summarization can extract meaning from documents, emails and chats. Large language models (LLMs) convert text into vector embeddings, enabling search and semantic similarity.
  
  
• Image and video (computer vision): convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers classify objects, detect anomalies, perform facial recognition and identify features in medical images. Video models track events over time and support content moderation.
  
  
• Audio data (speech processing): automatic speech recognition converts spoken words into text; audio classification models identify music genres, detect anomalies in machinery and interpret human emotion.
  
  

These AI models require training data. Techniques such as supervised learning (using labeled datasets), self‑supervised learning (learning from data without labels) and transfer learning allow models to generalize. Once trained, models can turn raw images into structured labels or convert audio recordings into transcribed text.

Table 2 – AI techniques for different types of unstructured data

Framework: AI pipeline for unstructured data

A systematic pipeline ensures that AI models deliver reliable insights:

1. Ingest and store – Use scalable storage (data lakes, object stores) to collect raw files.
   
   
2. Annotate and label – If supervised learning is used, annotate a representative sample of data. Labeling tools with human‑in‑the‑loop annotation help ensure quality.
   
   
3. Preprocess – Convert data into model‑friendly formats (e.g., tokenize text, convert images to pixel arrays, generate spectrograms for audio). Apply data augmentation (flipping images, adding noise) to improve generalization.
   
   
4. Train models – Select appropriate architectures (e.g., ResNet for images, Transformers for text) and train using GPU or cloud resources. Validate with cross‑validation and hold‑out datasets.
   
   
5. Deploy and infer – Deploy the trained model in production, either in the cloud or at the edge (e.g., on mobile devices or IoT gateways). For real‑time applications, inference should be optimized to meet latency requirements.
   
   
6. Monitor and retrain – Continuously monitor performance, detect concept drift and retrain with new data to maintain accuracy.
   
   

Quick summary

• How does AI help? AI and machine‑learning models can ingest and interpret large volumes of unstructured content (text, images, audio and video), converting it into structured insights. Different model architectures are tailored to different media types.
  
  

Why use AI now? AI adoption is accelerating: more than three‑quarters of organizations use AI somewhere in their business, and investments are soaring. However, the majority of enterprises still struggle to manage unstructured data, highlighting the need for governance and data preparation.

Transforming unstructured data into structured data has many advantages

Structure makes data easier to parse and analyze. A clear pattern or pathway for locating data makes data easy to access.

Once records are held in separate tables based on their categories, it is straightforward to insert, delete or update records that are subjected to the latest business requirements. Any number of new or existing tables or columns of data can be inserted or modified depending on the conditions provided.

Using join queries and conditional statements one can combine all, or any number of related tables in order to fetch the required data. Resulting data can be modified based on the values from any column, on any number of columns, which permits the user to effortlessly recover the relevant data as the result. It allows one to pick on the desired columns to be incorporated in the outcome so that only appropriate data will be displayed. Data can be deduplicated (de-duped), and noisy, irrelevant data can be eliminated.

Structured databases can grow and be modified over time. Changes can be made to a database configuration as well, which can be applied without difficulty devoid of crashing the data or the other parts of the database.

Increased security is also possible once data is structured. It is possible to tag some data categories as confidential and others not. When a data analyst tries to login with a username and password, boundaries can be set for their level of access, by providing admission only to the categories that they are allowed to work on, depending on their access level.

Benefits of structuring data:

• Improved searchability and analytics – Once data is organized into rows and columns, analysts can run SQL queries, join tables and perform statistical analysis. For example, marketers can link sales transactions with customer demographics to target promotions.
  
  
• Consistency and quality control – Normalization removes redundant information, deduplicates records and enforces referential integrity. This ensures that everyone refers to the same version of the truth.
  
  
• Integration and interoperability – Structured data can easily be loaded into business intelligence tools, dashboards and AI models. It integrates with enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM and supply‑chain management.
  
  
• Security and compliance – Fine‑grained access controls can restrict sensitive columns (e.g., personally identifiable information) while allowing analysts to use aggregate data. Compliance policies (GDPR, HIPAA) often require data to be classified and auditable.
  
  

Challenges of structuring unstructured data:

• Cost and complexity – Converting large volumes of unstructured content into structured tables requires investment in data labeling, extraction tools, OCR and natural language processing. Manual annotation can be labor intensive.
  
  
• Loss of context – During transformation, subtle nuances such as tone in customer feedback or spatial relationships in images may be lost. Semi‑structured formats might preserve more context.
  
  
• Dynamic data – User‑generated content is constantly changing. A one‑time structuring effort may quickly become outdated, necessitating continuous ingestion and transformation.
  
  

Table 3 – Pros and cons of transforming unstructured data into structured data

Checklist: Converting unstructured data to structured form

1. Inventory and prioritize – Identify high‑value unstructured datasets and prioritize those that deliver the greatest business impact.
   
   
2. Choose extraction techniques – Use OCR for scanned documents, speech‑to‑text for audio, and object detection for images. Modern transformer models can extract entities and relationships from text.
   
   
3. Define a schema – Design normalized tables that represent key entities (customers, products, events) and their relationships.
   
   
4. Label and map – Link extracted attributes to table columns. Validate data types and handle missing values.
   
   
5. Load into a database – Use ETL (extract, transform, load) tools or ELT pipelines to ingest structured records into a relational or graph database.
   
   
6. Implement governance – Define data ownership, establish access policies, track data lineage and schedule regular audits.
   
   
7. Continuously refine – Monitor for errors, refine extraction models and update schemas as business requirements evolve.

Expert insights

• Growth in unstructured vs. structured data – IDC reports that unstructured data is growing at a compound annual rate of 61 %, while structured data grows much slower. This means that the proportion of structured data will shrink to around 20 % of global data by 2025.
  
  
• Security risks – The Global Data Risk Report found that 21 % of all data is not protected. Without structuring and classification, organizations cannot enforce consistent security controls.
  
  
• Stale data – More than 54 % of company data is considered stale, highlighting the importance of lifecycle management when structuring information.
  
  

Expert commentary

Experts emphasize that structuring data is not merely a technical task; it is a governance and cultural challenge. Chief data officers often struggle to balance agility with compliance, especially when dealing with personal or regulated information. Thought leaders recommend automating classification using machine learning to reduce manual burden and implementing metadata‑rich catalogs to track the source and lineage of structured records.

Quick summary

• Why structure data? Organizing data into predefined tables improves searchability, analytics, integration and security. Structured data supports complex queries and allows you to enforce fine‑grained access controls.
  
  
• What are the trade‑offs? Transforming unstructured data is costly and may lose context, but it is necessary to unlock insights. The process requires continuous maintenance and strong governance.
  
  

A quick note about semi-structured data

It is probably important to point out that there is a lot of data out there that comes with some organizing properties, even though it may not be fully classified and structured in all of the ways that you want. Oftentimes, data contains internal tags and markings that allow for grouping and hierarchies. Native metadata allows for basic classification and keyword searches. It is common for semi-structured data to come in the form of image and video metadata, email, XML, JSON, or NoSQL.

Expanding on semi‑structured data

Semi‑structured data sits between structured and unstructured content. It contains self‑describing tags or markers that provide some organization but does not fit neatly into relational tables. Common formats include:

• XML and HTML documents – Hierarchical tags describe the elements and allow parsing.
  
  
• JSON, YAML and CSV with variable fields – Used in APIs, configuration files and log records.
  
  
• Email messages – Headers include sender, recipient, time stamps and subject, while the body may be unstructured.
  
  
• Image files with EXIF metadata – Photos include details like camera model, geolocation and exposure settings.
  
  

Because semi‑structured files include metadata, they can often be ingested by document databases or NoSQL systems without strict schemas. Tools such as MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB and Apache CouchDB store documents as key‑value pairs and allow queries over the embedded fields. Semi‑structured data is especially common in modern web applications and IoT platforms.

Table 4 – Comparison of structured, semi‑structured and unstructured data

Expert insights

• Research suggests that 80–90 % of enterprise data is unstructured or semi‑structured. Semi‑structured formats like JSON and XML are proliferating in web services and IoT applications.
  
  
• According to the Rivery report, approximately 60 % of corporate data is now stored in the cloud, much of it in semi‑structured formats that favour cloud object stores and document databases.
  
  
• Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations will shift toward small and wide data approaches – blending structured and semi‑structured data sources to enable more context‑rich analytics.

Expert commentary

Data management professionals note that semi‑structured data offers a practical compromise. It preserves some structure through tags while allowing flexibility for diverse content. Document databases, graph databases and search engines (e.g., Elasticsearch) make it easier to query semi‑structured fields. However, developers must still implement validation and indexing to ensure that key attributes can be retrieved efficiently. When designing analytics solutions, teams should evaluate whether semi‑structured formats provide enough organization or whether a full transformation to structured data is necessary.

Quick summary

• What is semi‑structured data? Semi‑structured data includes self‑describing tags or key‑value pairs (e.g., JSON, XML, email headers). It sits between structured tables and completely unstructured files.
• Why does it matter? Semi‑structured formats provide flexibility for evolving schemas and support searchability and limited querying. They are increasingly common in APIs, log files and IoT systems.

Conclusion

With recent advances in machine learning and AI, the wealth of information hiding away in unstructured data stores can now be used to guide business decisions, and create a whole new generation of products and services. Companies can tap into value-laden data like customer interactions, rich media, and social network conversations.