Eric (not his real name) was under pressure from his sales department. He was hesitant to close a large financing deal with a Chinese corporation but had little beyond his intuition to back up his position.

The company’s stock price had gained a whopping 600 percent in one year. Nevertheless, Eric followed his intuition and ran a software analysis on the company trading activity. It didn’t take long for a strange pattern to emerge: There was strong activity at the end of most trading days that was pushing the stock up. He had enough to kill the deal.

A few weeks later, that company’s stock crashed nearly 50 percent in a single day, triggering an extended trading suspension pending an investigation by the local regulator. Unstructured data analysis combined with human intuition had saved Eric’s firm from a severe financial and reputational loss.

This example, far from being isolated, stresses the opportunities of automated data management. The monetary cost of conserving data has plummeted during the last few decades while the processing technology has dramatically expanded. By now, machine-driven analysis has become as ubiquitous as Amazon or Google.

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