Signal AI Releases Graph Database for Reputation Insights

Unstructured data often encompasses a large portion of a company’s data. IDC predicts that volumes of unstructured data could reach 80% by 2025, and for some larger organizations, this is already a reality. This data has been traditionally collected in the form of text from emails, PDFs, or other documents, including video, audio, and photos. But a new round of unstructured data is beginning to flow in from outside sources, such as search engine queries, geographic data, streaming data from IoT devices, or social media. What if businesses could use this data to mine insights concerning their reputation?

Enter London-based Signal AI. The company has just released a knowledge graph database called the External Intelligence Graph, “a comprehensive view of an organization’s external world built on real-time data and content.” The company says its new graph maps relationships between the things an organization “needs to care about” such as climate change, supply chain risk, or competitor intelligence.

This graphic shows the full cycle of extracting business intelligence through Signal AI’s platform. Click to enlarge. Source: Signal AI

Signal AI’s website gives examples of questions the External Intelligence Graph can answer: “Is my company being mentioned in the news?” “Is a controversy brewing with my supplier?” “What patents have my competitors published?” By answering these questions, the product gives insight into how the organization is associated with those topics. “This entirely new kind of data, making sense of the huge amounts of unstructured content now available, can show how relationships are changing, and also offers up ‘unknown unknowns’ surfacing new, and previously unlinked, connections to an organization or individual,” the company said in a press release.

Signal AI asserts its External Intelligence Graph solves reputation-based problems in several ways. The platform can assist Chief Risk Officers with a “risk radar” specifically trained to analyze any imminent risk coming from outside the organization within its external ecosystem. Communications and marketing departments can gain insight into how others in the market perceive their company and can quantify an organization’s overall reputation, trust, and perception. These capabilities also extend to investment management, where insights can assist with investment decisions in terms of reputational risk and investment performance.

The company’s Chief Product Officer Clancy Childs explains how harnessing this unstructured data with AI can offer business value: “In part due to the rise of stakeholder capitalism and ESG focus, businesses are increasingly affected by the actions and behaviors of the people and organizations in the world outside of the company walls. The amount of external, unstructured data that now must be considered in modern decision making is daunting. With our AI technology working at scale, we provide the external intelligence to help businesses cut through the noise and understand the topics and events that are affecting them both directly and indirectly. It’s truly a game changer for business decision making and organizations operating at scale.”

Signal AI CEO and Founder David Benigson. Source: Signal AI

Signal AI was founded in a garage in 2013 by David Benigson, a 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree who sought to use AI to make his job more manageable. He was working for his family’s executive search firm and would spend hours manually curating information to include in a company newsletter. In his quest for automation, Benigson met Dr. Miguel Martinez, a data scientist and ML/AI expert, and together they built the Signal AI platform. In 2020 they launched the AIQ engine, which they call the brain behind the Signal platform. In late 2021 the company raised $50 million in Series D for a total funding of $100 million, and it currently claims that 40% of Fortune 500 companies are already using its products.

“Our External Intelligence Graph, powered by AIQ, takes the world’s burgeoning unstructured content and turns it into actionable insight to augment today’s business decisions, providing organizations with a new kind of in-the-moment critical intelligence,” said Luca Grulla, CTO of Signal AI. “We are able to provide an entirely new kind of data through our unique External Intelligence Graph, and an exciting new chapter in harnessing unstructured data awaits.”

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