Next-Generation Data Management: Empower the Enterprise with AI-Driven Automation

Figure 1: Bringing data and AI to life through AI-powered data management

In an age where data drives nearly every business decision, its role as a critical asset is undeniable. As organizations continue to generate and collect increasingly vast amounts of data, often in petabytes, the need to automate data management activities is critical. With growing data demands and complex use cases like regulatory compliance, advanced analytics and AI-driven insights, IT teams face mounting pressure to manage everything manually.

Tasks such as data governance, quality checks and integration, and supporting a growing number of users, can overwhelm IT resources. This is where data management automation acts as a game-changer. Automating tasks like data discovery, data quality assessment and data classification significantly reduces IT burden, enabling teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Informatica is at the forefront of this transformation, helping enterprises automate their data management processes through its AI-powered CLAIRE® engine (see Figure 1). From automatically identifying data quality issues to mapping data lineage across complex environments, Informatica’s solutions alleviate IT pressure, allowing businesses to scale their data operations efficiently and reliably. In this blog, we'll explore the importance of data management automation, why it’s essential for modern enterprises and how Informatica is driving this change.

Data management involves collecting, storing, organizing and maintaining data to ensure its accuracy, accessibility and readiness for decision-making. It starts with collecting data from various sources, like customer interactions or sales transactions, and then securely stores it in databases or data lakes for easy access. The proper organization of data, through classification and efficient management of metadata systems of records, makes data retrieval efficient.

Maintaining data quality is essential, as errors like duplicates or missing information can disrupt business processes. Companies regularly cleanse and validate data to ensure accuracy. Data security is also critical, with measures like encryption and access controls protecting sensitive information. Effective governance ensures that data is consistently managed and compliant with regulations, while integration combines data from different systems to provide a unified view for analysis.

In short, data management ensures businesses can use their data efficiently, securely and in compliance with regulations, driving better decisions and insights.

Today, automating data management is more critical than ever, propelled by the exponential growth in data volume, variety and velocity. Companies now gather data from various sources, including IoT devices, social media platforms and transactional systems, creating an overwhelming influx of information. For instance, a retail company might simultaneously collect data from online sales, customer feedback and its supply chain management system. Managing this data manually is not only impractical but also inefficient. Automated systems can streamline data ingestion and processing, ensuring businesses keep pace with rapid environmental changes while maintaining data quality and governance.

One significant benefit of data management automation is the time it saves. By automating repetitive tasks like data cleansing, transformation and integration, data professionals can concentrate on strategic initiatives. For example, automated data pipelines can continuously pull data from various sources, cleanse it, and prepare it for analysis without human intervention, enhancing data profiling efforts. This acceleration in workflow boosts productivity and minimizes errors associated with manual handling. Automation tools can quickly identify anomalies and inconsistencies, significantly reducing the risks of costly mistakes tied to human oversight and reinforcing data governance.

Cost efficiency also underscores the importance of embracing data management automation. By diminishing reliance on manual processes, organizations can lower labor costs and optimize resource allocation. A financial institution, for example, might implement automated compliance checks to ensure data adheres to regulatory standards, saving time and money while minimizing the risk of fines. Furthermore, automation allows businesses to derive insights more rapidly. Automated analytics tools can provide real-time reporting and visualization, enabling organizations to make informed decisions swiftly. In a fast-paced market, the ability to act on insights promptly can be the difference between seizing an opportunity and falling behind competitors.

Figure 2: One AI solution across the services of data management 

With the digital arena shifting so quickly, enterprises are constantly seeking ways to optimize data management processes to gain a competitive edge. The Informatica AI-powered engine CLAIRE is a significant breakthrough in this pursuit. By leveraging cloud-scale AI alongside a rich metadata system of records, Informatica equips businesses like Helia to automate key data management tasks with precision and intelligence (see Figure 2).

As Michelle Soakell-Ho, Data Governance Leader at Helia, attests: “By taking control of our data and governance, we’re building a foundation to surpass our customers’ expectations and maximize value from AI.”

Justin Glatz, Chief Information Officer at Petmate, shares CLAIRE’s impact on their operations: “CLAIRE copilot will bring a crowd-sourced expertise and rapid acceleration of development that used to only be available through a cadre of consulting firms,” Glatz explains. “Rather than waiting months, or even years, to get multiple points of view, CLAIRE gives us access to all of that thinking globally, instantly.”

Figure 3: The evolution of CLAIRE^® AI-powered data management for the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud™

In 2017, CLAIRE marked a major advancement in data management automation, particularly in metadata discovery (see Figure 3). CLAIRE was able to analyze technical, business and usage metadata within enterprises, automating critical tasks such as data discovery, lineage tracking and impact analysis. This AI-driven data management approach gave businesses unprecedented visibility into their data, enabling them to monitor data quality, uncover patterns in data and streamline operations without manual intervention.

CLAIRE's early role in metadata discovery marked a pivotal step toward creating a unified data catalog. This catalog allowed organizations to classify assets, detect issues and reinforce robust data governance processes. It became the foundation for ensuring that enterprises could maintain and access a consistent and reliable view of their data across the organization. The automation of data integration, governance and quality checks empowered businesses to manage their data efficiently. As these early capabilities evolved, they laid the groundwork for today’s comprehensive AI-powered data management automation strategy. By maintaining a unified data catalog, enterprises can now seamlessly track data lineage, comply with regulations and derive faster insights, further enhancing their competitive advantage.

As businesses transitioned to the cloud, CLAIRE evolved into a leading solution for data management automation by integrating metadata across multiple organizations into a unified metadata platform. This shift has empowered companies to leverage predictive AI for more intelligent decision-making. With CLAIRE, enterprises can automate critical tasks such as data classification, glossary associations and entity matching, and receive AI-driven recommendations for relevant datasets and next-best actions. By analyzing metadata from various sources, CLAIRE enables businesses to implement smarter, interconnected data management strategies while maintaining a consistent and comprehensive metadata system of record.

CLAIRE’s predictive AI capabilities play a crucial role in streamlining data management automation. It uncovers relationships between datasets, allowing organizations to discover new connections and optimize data utilization. Through dataset similarity, CLAIRE helps businesses match data across multiple sources based on metadata, identifying redundant or outdated data that can be safely deleted, which minimizes human involvement. Its intelligent discovery function simplifies the process of locating relevant data across large repositories, while its robust analytics capabilities offer insights into data quality, completeness, relevance and usage, allowing businesses to make necessary improvements quickly. This level of automation reduces the complexity of governance and ensures that data is structured efficiently to meet business needs.

In addition, CLAIRE automates glossary associations, linking data assets to business glossaries through metadata analysis, ensuring consistent terminology and improving data literacy throughout the enterprise. This capability allows organizations to efficiently review millions of data assets, linking them to business terms without the need for manual intervention, saving both time and resources. CLAIRE also helps implement data governance, simplifying compliance efforts while enhancing overall data management. By enriching data with contextual and external information, CLAIRE makes data more valuable for business decision-making.

Moreover, CLAIRE’s predictive AI excels in anomaly detection, continuously scanning data to flag unusual patterns that may signal quality issues or errors. It assesses data quality (DQ) by evaluating key metrics like accuracy and completeness, ensuring that organizations maintain high standards of data reliability. CLAIRE's automated lineage tracking and metadata enrichment further contribute to a complete data management automation solution, enabling businesses to optimize processes and ensure their data is accurate, compliant and readily available for informed decision-making.

By integrating these automation capabilities, businesses can significantly reduce manual interventions, uncover new opportunities and maintain agility in today’s dynamic data landscape. With CLAIRE’s predictive intelligence at the heart of data management processes, enterprises can unlock the full potential of their data, driving efficiency, compliance and innovation.

Figure 4: CLAIRE GPT business value

Enterprises are tasked with managing ever-growing volumes of data while ensuring it is accessible to users with diverse technical expertise. To meet this challenge, Informatica leverages generative AI to revolutionize data management automation through its groundbreaking solution, CLAIRE® GPT, launched in May 2024. This innovation aims to simplify and enhance how organizations manage and consume data, making it more accessible and user-friendly across all levels of technical proficiency (see Figure 5). 

Figure 6: Representation of data integration mapping

Simplifying Data Interaction with Natural Language: One of the standout capabilities of CLAIRE GPT is its ability to automate data management through natural language prompts. This reduces the complexity for non-technical users, enabling them to interact with data without requiring deep coding knowledge (see Figure 6). Traditionally, understanding and managing data required expertise in complex technical languages and processes, limiting access to data insights to a small subset of employees. CLAIRE GPT democratizes data by allowing users across the organization — whether analysts, business users, or executives — to query, process and analyze data simply by asking questions in natural language. This data management automation not only improves data accessibility but also enhances productivity and drives better decision-making across the enterprise. Senior Director of Enterprise Data Management at HICV, Michael Nolder, highlights this evolution, saying, “Natural language processing in CLAIRE GPT will help teams define terms and link them together while protecting our customers’ data from a security standpoint.” (Read more of the HICV story here.)

Figure 7: CLAIRE GPT empowers users to interact with their data through natural language. 

Automating Complex Data Management Workflows: Beyond simplifying data interaction, CLAIRE GPT automates complex data management workflows such as data discovery, pipeline creation, metadata exploration and data quality assessments. With these tasks automated, CLAIRE GPT can reduce the time spent on data management by as much as 80%, allowing professionals to focus on strategic initiatives that drive innovation. Whether maintaining data integrity in large, complex environments or ensuring high-quality data, CLAIRE GPT streamlines these critical workflows, providing a faster, more efficient way to manage vast data ecosystems (see Figure 7).

Informatica’s CLAIRE GPT marks a major leap in data management automation by combining the power of generative AI with a deep understanding of enterprise data ecosystems. This approach simplifies data interaction and automates intricate workflows. It also empowers businesses to optimize efficiency, improve decision-making, and ensure that data remains a strategic asset in today’s competitive, data-driven world.

As data becomes increasingly vital to business success, the demand for efficient, scalable and automated data management solutions is at an all-time high. CLAIRE is revolutionizing AI-driven data management by automating complex workflows and enhancing accessibility through natural language interaction. With predictive AI uncovering deep insights and automating tasks like data discovery, quality assessments and governance, CLAIRE simplifies the entire data management process. This automation empowers organizations to make more informed, strategic decisions while improving efficiency.

Informatica CLAIRE GPT represents the next frontier in data management automation, combining the power of generative AI with deep understanding of enterprise data ecosystems. It is redefining how businesses manage, analyze and leverage their data, setting new benchmarks for innovation and productivity in the data-driven era.

Are you ready to elevate your data management processes with cutting-edge automation?  Visit https://www.informatica.com/about-us/claire/claire-gpt.html or reach out to us to learn more and get started today.