AI-driven data management saves £1m in storage costs for leading professional services firm.
How one leading professional services firm is using Aiimi’s AI-enabled technology to help manage, classify, and govern its data, saving approximately £1m in storage costs, reducing risk, and lowering carbon emissions.
The Challenge
With 20,000 clients, five lines of service, and almost 30,000 employees, this professional services firm is a complex business operating in a highly regulated industry. Its data landscape is a reflection of that scale and complexity, with petabytes of unstructured data, content saved across many file types, dozens of systems of record and environments, and thousands of different applications.
The firm faced several internal drivers for changes in data management – such as its ESG commitments, increased demand for unstructured data, cost optimisation, preparing for adopting enterprise AI, and a sprawling tech stack – as well as multiple external factors, including evolving regulatory and technology landscapes, increased complexity in data sovereignty laws, and ever-present and increasingly sophisticated cyber risks.
Our Solution
Now, the firm is using the Aiimi Workplace AI Platform to power a new AI-enabled data management approach. Together, we set some key objectives for data management that would ultimately help manage their risk and/or enable business value:
Enable colleagues to locate and classify the content they need.
Embed data governance model through clarity of data ownership .
Reduce data storage costs and carbon emissions.
Ensure high-risk content is managed appropriately and policies are adhered to.
Drive Generative AI and data innovation.
The Aiimi platform scans the firm’s environment to automatically identify and classify personal or sensitive data, like corporate IP, enabling the firm to secure that content and facilitating better management of data risks. Using AI and enrichment technology, the Aiimi platform automatically discovers and labels data by topics and teams, to give the firm a clear picture of its broader data landscape, as well as the ability to curate its information and the opportunity to reduce storage requirements. The AI platform enables innovation by connecting people to insights and content, so that the business can leverage its data and prepare for the adoption of Generative AI. And through data ownership, Aiimi’s technology is helping the firm to operationalise data management and establish its own Data Service.
The Results
Using Aiimi’s AI-enabled technology, this leading professional services organisation is able to better manage risk, reduce costs, and lower its carbon emissions. This approach has strengthened data governance and provided strong content management foundations for added-value use cases. It’s enabled the firm to remediate more than 200 million files, delete 150TB of data, and remove thousands of data leakage risks, saving approximately £1m in storage costs and reducing associated CO₂ emissions. The programme has reached more than 25,000 employees and empowered data owners. And through the curation of data, it’s enabling Generative AI use cases for the firm.
Looking ahead, the focus is on transitioning these programme activities into a Data Service, to enable the continual understanding, governing, and connecting of data across the firm’s landscape. To achieve this, discoverability and data curation activities will be underpinned by ongoing change management. Objectives for its Data Service will include curating documents for Generative AI use cases, connecting SMEs to content, finding, classifying, and labelling unstructured data, and ensuring ongoing compliance.
