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CIOs Reveal Top 3 Strategies for Unlocking AI’s Potential with Unstructured Data

An illustration of a woman with various icons showing data.
Unstructured data is no longer an untapped resource — it’s the foundation of AI-powered transformation. [Image credit: Firefly]

Data is the foundation of AI, and for CIOs, the real challenge—and opportunity—lies in harnessing unstructured data.

Accounting for nearly 90% of enterprise data, unstructured data includes documents, videos, images, emails, sensor data, and social media content. Unlike structured data neatly stored in databases, unstructured data is difficult to organize and extract insights from. Yet, it holds the key to unlocking deeper customer understanding, operational efficiencies, and AI-driven innovation.

However, most organizations still struggle to integrate, analyze, and govern unstructured data effectively. Siloed data remains underutilized, preventing enterprises from maximizing their AI investments. To address this, Salesforce conducted in-depth interviews with 20 CIOs and IT leaders from industries including technology, finance, manufacturing, automotive, energy, and healthcare. Their insights reveal three critical strategies for transforming unstructured data into a competitive advantage.

1. Achieving full integration: Making data AI-ready

For CIOs, the ultimate goal is seamless data integration—structured and unstructured—into a unified platform that fuels AI and intelligent agents. However, achieving this requires a well-defined strategy, robust governance, and advanced AI capabilities.

A CIO from a leading financial services company captured this vision:

In an ideal world, all kinds of organization data should be instantly accessible, without manual processes or dependencies. I should just be able to ask AI and generative AI for what I need, and the system should deliver it.

CIO, Financial Services, USA

This vision is no longer aspirational — it’s possible today. With Agentforce and Data Cloud’s hybrid search,  retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and vector database capabilities, enterprises can seamlessly connect all data sources and surface insights through AI-powered assistants. Imagine AI agents that intelligently retrieve, analyze, and act on data — structured or unstructured — without manual intervention.

Power agentic AI with Data Cloud

Data Cloud surfaces critical customer context from PDFs, audio files, and videos to Agentforce, making your AI agents smarter and more accurate. 

2. Predictive intelligence: Turning unstructured data into actionable insights

8 out of 10 of business leaders agree that data is critical for decision-making. Yet, without the ability to extract insights from unstructured data, organizations risk missing key signals—whether from customer feedback, system logs, or market trends.

For many CIOs, AI’s real power lies in predicting and preventing disruptions before they happen. A general manager from a global technology firm emphasized this:

To save lives. Hands down, the ultimate vision is to save lives. To be able to get knowledge of holistic data, structured, unstructured, into a view where you can predict, is the ultimate goal for humans, I think. We wanna be able to predict to prevent.

General Manager, Technology, USA

This predictive AI capability is now a reality. AI agents can continuously analyze real-time data streams, detect anomalies, and trigger automated actions—transforming reactive operations into proactive intelligence.

We have entered the agentic AI era when, in the words of Ryan Aytay, Tableau CEO, “thanks to Agentforce, we can have ‘inspector agents’ that are always on and look for anomalies across any business or department. These AI agents will be able to identify issues and opportunities across any business and then trigger instant actions.”

3. Governance and security: Managing data and AI with trust and compliance

For CIOs, data security and governance remain a top priority. Without proper controls, unstructured data environments can quickly turn into unmanageable data sprawl, increasing risks and compliance concerns.

A head of Data & Analytics at an energy company articulated this challenge:

I’ll tell you what my number one feature request would be, across anything unstructured. It’s all security governance, data retention policies. One of the biggest problems, when people get access to a lot of these platforms, is they devolve so quickly into dumping grounds.

Head of Data & Analytics, Energy, Australia

To mitigate these risks, organizations must implement automated governance frameworks, including:

  • Data classification and tagging to improve accessibility and compliance
  • Policy-driven encryption & retention to ensure regulatory adherence
  • AI-powered access controls that dynamically adjust based on risk factors

Governance and encryption in Data Cloud

Tagging, classification, and encryption can help you drive reliable agentic AI results. Learn more from the experts with our on-demand webinar.

The future of agent-first enterprises starts with unstructured data

Unstructured data is no longer an untapped resource — it’s the foundation of AI-powered transformation. By integrating, analyzing, and governing this data effectively, CIOs can:

  • Enhance AI and automation with real-time insights
  • Enable predictive intelligence to drive proactive decision-making
  • Ensure security and compliance with advanced governance solutions

The right data platform — like Salesforce Data Cloud — powers contextually aware, trusted, autonomous AI agents that turn unstructured data into an enterprise asset.

Agentic AI Starts with Harnessing Unstructured Data—20 CIOs Share Their Strategies.

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