Back in 2022, global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicted that, by 2025, employees in most companies would “use data to optimize nearly every aspect of their work.” The implementation of AI has only accelerated reliance on data, with nearly 78% of companies leveraging these solutions to inform corporate decision-making.

However, despite rapid technology advances, organizations still face challenges in driving value from data, analytics, and AI, which in turn impedes their ability to make confident, actionable decisions.

Due to data silos and fragmentation across organizations, non-contextual approaches are often unable to deliver the type of unified, real-time views companies need today. Growing data volumes, velocity, and variety also bring added complexity and scalability challenges, as well as problems with integration across multi-layered systems. And for some industries, the constantly evolving regulatory environment increases the complexity of these systems, requiring more applied people-hours without meaningful gains.

The result is that organizations across many industries struggle to truly understand their data or leverage it in an impactful way.

Connecting internal and external data is imperative to create a holistic view that provides a real-world view of people, places, and institutions. Once this is in place, organizations can create context to reveal hidden connections and relationships between data points.

This is what enables organizations to maximize the value of data, analytics, and AI to drive actionable decisions.

What is context?

Context is the bridge between insights and impact, between data and decisions. It serves as the foundation of decision intelligence, connecting the dots between people, places, transactions, and events in order to provide the full picture of how everything is related to everything else—not just isolated facts. 

Without context, data, analytics, and AI can be misleading or misinterpreted. Context provides clarity and transparency. Essentially, it transforms raw data into real-world understanding.

How does context enable better decisions across the enterprise?

Contextual data, analytics, and AI unlock a new level of decision-making potential that is faster, smarter, and can scale with your organization as it grows. Every team across your organization is empowered to make actionable decisions that drive real impact.

Context enables organizations to:

• Make confident decisions to build strength and resilience, driving real impact that protects your organization, improves productivity, and grows revenue. ​

• Find hidden savings and optimize value by removing duplication and simplifying operations, all while still advancing.

• Remain agile in an ever-evolving complex environment, and discover unseen opportunities even within the changes and disruptions.

• Enhance preparation for future AI advancements by investing in the foundational context​ layer and enhancing human-AI collaboration.

How does context work in real-life scenarios?

Context makes data meaningful by connecting discrete points—names, places, accounts, addresses—to the real-world situations they represent. Without context, decisions risk being based on incomplete or misleading information or subject to misinterpretation, particularly when multiple entities are involved.

Let's consider financial crime detection–one of the more complex use cases for Quantexa's Decision Intelligence Platform. There are two main considerations at hand: (1) Bad actors in this space rarely operate in isolation, and (2) the same transaction patterns can indicate either legitimate activity or illicit behavior, depending on surrounding circumstances.

Context is key. By considering factors such as customer profiles, historical behavior, geographic patterns, and relationships between entities, it is possible to distinguish false alarms from genuine threats. Gaining a broader, contextual picture makes it easier to spot anomalies that, in isolation, might appear normal—for example, distinguishing a suspicious transfer from a legitimate one by considering the customer’s usual activity, location, and known associates.

No context vs context in a complex use case

Without context

Without context, financial crime can easily fall under the radar. Due to fragmented and siloed data, there is often an incomplete and isolated view of people, places, and things. Using a non-contextual approach (traditionally called ‘transaction monitoring’), hidden risk can go undetected when the transaction are view in isolation as they don’t tell the whole picture.

With context

By adding context, a full picture can be built from the data, which means that patterns of behavior and otherwise hidden connections are surfaced holistically. So, in this example, enriching customer data with third-party intelligence, such as watchlists and corporate data, a collusive organized network is revealed. Using this contextual approach results in financial crime being detected more accurately and efficiently.

Connecting siloed internal and external data allows organizations to create a unified view of customers. This enables financial crimes teams to derive contextual insights, detect risk earlier and more accurately, and act decisively.

Data enriched with context allows banks to adapt to a complex and evolving regulatory environment, surfacing and protecting against hidden risks. But banking is by no means the only sector that benefits from a clear picture of customers, their behaviors, and their transactions in real time.

As more and more companies leverage data in their everyday business processes, context is an invaluable part of any mature data strategy, particularly as they seek to deploy AI solutions.

Learn more about how context supports financial crimes teams to improve risk detection at HSBC.

What is a Contextual Fabric, and why is it important?

Siloed data often leads to making decisions on isolated facts, rather than the full picture. Quantexa’s Contextual Fabric addresses this challenge by unifying, managing, and connecting data to create a knowledge-rich asset that brings together fragmented bits of data from disparate sources, supporting informed, confident decisions.

What is it?
Contextual Fabric provides a dynamic, real-world view of connected data enriched with contextual knowledge, enabling organizations to use data consistently across the enterprise.

What makes it unique?
Contextual Fabric empowers enterprises with the ability to connect data directly to business value, delivering a trusted foundation that enhances data quality, yielding stronger, more precise decisions across organizations.

How is it used?
Analysts gain access to accurate, connected datasets. Data scientists can prototype, build, and deploy models that incorporate contextual knowledge. Data engineers are empowered to process, transform, and distribute data with confidence. Subject matter experts and managers can embed context into decision-making and automated processes. Data technology owners can manage both metadata and entity quality data effectively.

When rich data is unified and managed with Contextual Fabric, everyone’s processes and decisions gain a competitive edge.

Related content: How to Activate Your Data Estate: The Quantexa Contextual Fabric

Introducing Quantexa’s Decision Intelligence Platform

This is where Quantexa’s Decision Intelligence Platform is truly game-changing, enabling our customers to bridge the gap between data and decisions. Our platform empowers these organizations to become truly decision-centric, yielding an AI-ready data foundation—enriched with context—that can power intelligent augmentation, simulate scenarios, predict outcomes, and automate action.

Here’s how the platform works, in a nutshell:

1. First, it unifies data. Our platform allows you to ingest data from across the ecosystem, breaking down silos to create a trusted and continuously refreshed foundation.

2. Then, it creates context. Our platform helps you to build a picture of real-world relationships and connections from billions of data points, with scoring, rationale, and traceability, so insights are not just accurate, but actionable. This is called the Contextual Fabric. It’s a unified, consistent knowledge layer for all data to support and augment operational and analytical use cases. Contextual Fabric not only helps you connect data at scale, but also build better contextual analytics, adopt transparent AI, and activate your data through trusted data products.

3. Finally, it empowers action. With trusted intelligence at the core, our platform enables you to democratize contextual data across your entire organization, making it accessible to everyone who needs it, empowering confident augmented and automated human and AI decision-making in real-time—from the frontline, to the back office, to the boardroom.

As more and more companies leverage AI tools and data in tandem, context is all the more critical for supporting human-AI collaboration and decision automation. With context, AI systems have the background they need to interpret situations correctly, prioritize tasks, and produce relevant recommendations. When AI “sees” the full picture of goals, constraints, past actions, and real-time conditions, it can better align its outputs with human intent. Errors are reduced, and automated decisions are more trustworthy and efficient.

Context is the future of transformation

Context is the foundation on which effective Decision Intelligence is built.

To evolve from a data-driven organization to a unified decision-making powerhouse, the focus must go beyond connecting data. You need to contextualize data, model decision workflows, and power AI with context so that scaling successful operational, tactical, and strategic decisions from data is finally possible.​  

Related content: From Data-Driven to Decision-Centric: The Next Evolution in Enterprise Intelligence.

When you create context, what can be done with this level of insight is staggering. No more second-guessing—just efficient workforce muscle that truly collaborates in one motion and continues to improve over time. 

If you’d like to learn more about how a contextual foundation can transform your Decision Intelligence, we invite you to spend some time exploring Quantexa’s Decision Intelligence platform and get in touch. Smart, fast, and scalable decision-making is finally within reach.