The Intersection of AI and Data Integration and What it Means for your Future Projects

AI really is everywhere these days. We use face ID to open our phones. Our streaming feeds choose our entertainment. AI tools help write our emails, manage our homes, and avoid delays on our commutes.

As with any major technological advancement, AI is fundamentally altering how we live and work. For businesses, that translates to more intelligent applications of their data. Integrated data aggregates insights from multiple resources to inform more proactive and efficient decision making.  

AI and machine learning are making it easier for businesses to leverage their data intelligence and expand on the benefits of integration. Let’s look at how AI and data integration intersect and what those applications might mean for your future projects.

AI in the Lead up to Integration

A crucial aspect of integration is ensuring clean data in the target and destination systems. Machine learning algorithms and AI can identify inconsistencies, missing values, and outliers in your data that could negatively impact the outcomes of the project. The AI applies rules for how to handle those inconsistencies to clean up that data so it’s ready for integration.

Duplicate records are also a concern when integrating, and an area where AI can assist. AI-powered algorithms can facilitate data matching procedures to remove duplicates and make the integration outcomes more reliable.

AI can also augment existing data with external information. For instance, natural language processing (NLP) can extract insights from text data, while machine learning models can predict missing data points.

AI Use Cases During Integration

Integrations between common applications like CRM and Marketing Automation are usually straightforward, but it’s rare that any business uses its software tools without some customizations. The more complex your data mapping requirements, the longer it will take to get them appropriately sorted. AI mapping systems can be used to outline complex integration mappings for more accurate and timely results.

Another area AI can support more intelligent integration is with processing large data sets. For businesses working with legacy solutions, machine learning algorithms can improve the processing rate of big data to prepare the information for integration. For more modern applications, AI can take difficult-to-transform data sourced from places like SMS and translate those huge volumes of information correctly.

Using AI Post Integration

Integration is an ongoing process where information continues being passed between applications at scheduled intervals or in real-time. New data added to the integrated systems becomes part of the integration process. As time goes on, keeping that data accurate and adapting the integration to changing organizational needs are paramount. AI can support long-term maintenance and customization of the integration.

For example, AI can continuously monitor integrated data for anomalies or irregularities, helping to identify potential issues or security breaches. It can also adapt specific data integration requirements and learn from user interactions to tailor the processes to the organization’s changing needs. As the company evolves, the way the integration flows through information must evolve alongside it.

When users want to query integrated data for quick answers, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can facilitate those queries, retrieving data through Natural Language Processing (NLP) to make it more accessible to non-technical users.

The Future of AI and Data Integration

As the applications of AI and machine learning continue to evolve, so will their use cases for integration. AI will enable faster real-time data access with more dynamic data synchronization. Predictive analytics capabilities will be enhanced using sophisticated AI models to leverage integrated data from multiple sources at once.

Data security and privacy will enjoy a new layer of protection through AI’s role in identifying vulnerabilities and monitoring data access, and machine learning algorithms will get better at mapping and transforming data to reduce manual intervention in data preparation.

The intersection of AI and data integration has the potential to revolutionize how organizations handle and leverage their data. It can improve the quality of integrated data, provide valuable insights, and automate many aspects of the data integration process, ultimately leading to more informed decision-making and improved operational efficiency.