Way back in 1914, engineer and data visualization pioneer Willard Brinton observed that while companies went to considerable effort to analyze and catalog their information, most failed to draw useful conclusions from it. "Known facts cannot be marshaled and presented in such [a] manner as to be effective," he wrote more than 100 years ago. Yes, that's how long companies have struggled to make sense of and extract value from what's now called big data - datasets so large they can only be analyzed via computer.

Today, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-era data platforms may be the key that finally unlocks the value of big data - not by, yet again, reinventing the way data is processed and stored, but by reimagining the way it's accessed and disseminated throughout an organization.

For example, the unique approach of Data Cloud not only connects all your big data, regardless of source, but makes it accessible and actionable to all business users in the apps they use every day. This relevant, trusted data is automatically sent to an AI model, giving it the context it needs to create high-quality outputs.

All your data is, at long last, unified, harmonized, and accessible to every business app and user. It's a far cry from where we've been.