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It is no secret that data is the internet's most precious commodity. Even before AI’s meteoric rise, tech companies were in the business of collecting and selling data, usually the data of their users.
AI has only exacerbated the need for data, as online information is the fuel that powers the large language models and neural nets that have become mainstream in the past two years. This has created what some have dubbed a war of bots, where AI bots scour websites for free data, while other defensive AI bots work to prevent the former from stripping valuable and sometimes paywalled information from its website.
This reality, which sounds more like an excerpt from a sci-fi novella, is as strange as it is consequential. Corporations, organizations, and content creators find themselves in the middle of the battleground holding the very valuables the battle is being fought over.
While data is no doubt a commodity, the prevalence of AI bots harvesting data does not alone make it valuable. It is the precise process of combing through that data to find meaning that creates the value. Bots are good at aggregating content, but they often fail to analyze the data in a way that is useful to one who needs a thorough understanding of the dataset.
Bots search every corner of the internet to consume mass swaths of information, but such AI programs have missed the trees for the forest. All of that information is useless if it is not processed in a way that shares real, actionable insights. The ability to properly analyze data, then, is the greater commodity in the information environment.
In an online environment saturated with bots collecting and distributing data, how can any organization analyze or even begin to find data that can help them make the correct decision?
The solution is the combination of AI and human intelligence. It is well-documented that AI programs can produce information that is unreliable or blatantly false. This is an issue for a company that needs to make decisions quickly but also needs reliable information to make those key decisions. Even trained human analysts, however, cannot parse the mountains of relevant data quickly enough to inform the decision-makers of the best possible course of action.
This is where the balance can be struck: using the expediency of AI to parse through volumes of data, and empowering trained analysts to make sense of the data. This is the primary goal of narrative intelligence.
Very basically, narrative intelligence is the ability to listen, understand, and analyze narratives or stories effectively. The state and size of the current information environment make manually gaining narrative intelligence impossible. The flip side of that coin is that relying on a technology like AI, which is still in its infancy, to unilaterally provide narrative intelligence is unwise.
At EdgeTheory, we have built our platforms to find a happy medium: we apply AI to online narratives in order to provide analysts and decision-makers with the tools they need to survive in a bot-filled world. From high-level executive summaries of ongoing global conflicts to obscure networks that tout harmful and manipulative content, EdgeTheory has the capabilities to trace these narratives and provide data that is vetted and mission-critical.
Features like AI theme tracing, source tracking, rich data visualizations, and executive-level narrative briefs give leaders data they can sort through and act on quickly and with confidence. EdgeTheory’s AI-native technology does the heavy lifting so that decision-makers can have in-depth data they can trust.
A narrative is data that can make or break an organization’s mission. Bots might aggregate this data, but decision-makers must have the resources to properly analyze the dataset to have success. Narrative intelligence, bolstered by AI and human capabilities, provides a path forward for organizations to navigate the war for data and come out victorious.
EdgeTheory’s narrative intelligence solutions can kickstart your organization’s understanding of the narratives that affect your industry every day. If you’d like to learn more about how EdgeTheory can help your decision-makers be more effective, click here or scroll to the bottom of this page and request a demo.
