IM Blog: The Information Drought: Your Organisation's Hidden AI Goldmine
By as early as 2026, the world may face a critical shortage of high-quality information to train artificial intelligence systems. This isn't dystopian fantasy – it's a wake-up call that presents the greatest opportunity information management professionals have seen in decades.
The engines powering today's AI revolution – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – have been feasting on publicly available information: websites, books, forums, social media, and news articles. But this digital banquet is reaching its end. The high-quality content has been largely consumed, legal restrictions are tightening, and what remains online tends to be redundant or low-value. Even more striking, AI systems are now absorbing new online information almost as fast as it's created, fundamentally changing the information ecosystem.
Here's what most organisations don't realise: prior to cloud computing, almost all valuable corporate information was recorded onto backup tapes and offline storage. The cloud became AI's fundamental bedrock, providing the compute and storage that allowed massive models to scale. But those historical corporate information archives? AI has never seen them. Until now.
The Untapped Reservoir: Your Internal Information Goldmine
Every organisation sits on a massive reservoir of internal information that has traditionally served record-keeping, compliance, or reporting functions. This includes:
- Documents and spreadsheets spanning decades
- Email archives containing institutional knowledge
- Call transcripts reflecting customer interactions
- PDFs documenting processes and procedures
- Images capturing organisational history
- Metadata describing context and relationships
Unlike public information, this internal content is deeply specific to your organisation. It reflects your customers, processes, language, and accumulated knowledge, making it incredibly valuable for the next phase of AI development.
Using internal information to train or fine-tune AI models isn't just a technical upgrade – it's a strategic transformation. A legal firm could create AI tools that summarise case notes in their preferred format. A manufacturing company could leverage historical information to forecast maintenance needs and optimise supply chains. Even a simple internal chatbot trained on company policies can dramatically reduce the burden on HR and operations teams.
The competitive advantage is clear: proprietary AI models grounded in internal knowledge are not only more useful, they're also harder for competitors to replicate, creating durable market advantages in increasingly information-driven industries.
Making Your Information AI-Ready: The Information Manager's Moment
Most enterprise information isn't AI-ready. It's scattered across silos, stored in outdated formats, or buried under layers of confidentiality. But this challenge plays directly to the strengths of information management professionals.
The first step is comprehensive information discovery:
- Conduct thorough internal audits
- Identify key information assets across all systems
- Bring structure to organisational information chaos
- Scan paper documents and extract content from legacy formats
- Consolidate email archives and digital communications
- Tag files with enriched metadata for improved discoverability
Security and governance become critical enablers:
- Embed information privacy and legal compliance into AI development processes
- Implement robust access controls and handling procedures
- Protect sensitive customer information, employee records, and financial details
- Apply proven information governance practices as innovation catalysts
Reimagine archiving strategies through an AI lens:
- Structure documents for long-term AI value extraction
- Transform metadata from simple tags into crucial AI assets
- Document creation context, purpose, and relationships
- Design retention strategies that balance compliance with AI usability
This is where information professionals become indispensable. The principles of good information governance – accuracy, integrity, accessibility, retention – are now central to AI success. Your expertise in classification, compliance management, metadata creation, and usage tracking has never been more relevant.
From Passive Archives to Active Intelligence
Once your information is cleaned, secured, and structured, you can explore hybrid approaches that combine internal content with public sources safely and effectively. Public information provides general context, definitions, and industry benchmarks, while internal information delivers the specificity needed for precision and contextual awareness.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a powerful solution:
- AI accesses relevant internal documents at query time
- Systems find applicable information and use it to inform responses
- Sensitive information isn't permanently absorbed into models
- Approach is secure, scalable, and effective for most use cases
For organisations choosing direct model fine-tuning:
- Use techniques like sensitive field masking
- Consider synthetic information generation to protect confidential content
- Deploy AI infrastructure meeting information residency and privacy requirements
- Implement private cloud environments or on-premises solutions
- Adopt zero-trust security frameworks
The transformation from passive archive to active intelligence resource is profound. Your organisation's AI model could potentially know everything about your institution from its inception – an incredibly powerful capability that's now becoming reality.
The Strategic Advantages and Cultural Transformation
The rewards of leveraging internal information for AI extend far beyond technical capabilities:
Operational Benefits:
- Faster, more accurate decision-making through cross-organisational insights
- Improved productivity via automated document summarisation and report generation
- Enhanced customer experiences driven by historical interaction understanding
- Reduced burden on support teams through intelligent knowledge bases
Strategic Advantages:
- Information transforms from cost centre to strategic asset
- Competitive differentiation through proprietary AI capabilities
- Potential for new revenue streams through licensable AI models
- Barriers to entry for competitors trying to replicate capabilities
Cultural Evolution:
- Employees see their knowledge reflected in AI tools, increasing engagement
- Information quality improvement becomes organisation-wide priority
- Digital skills development accelerates across teams
- Innovation becomes embedded in everyday work
Adopting AI doesn't mean replacing people – it means amplifying their impact. Skilled professionals can focus on critical thinking, creativity, and relationship-building while AI handles routine tasks. A policy analyst might use AI to scan thousands of regulatory pages and surface relevant passages, freeing time for interpretation and strategy. Customer service representatives could access dynamic knowledge bases trained on previous cases to resolve inquiries more quickly and accurately.
Your Competitive Moment
For records and information management professionals, this moment represents both fundamental shift and unprecedented opportunity. As AI capabilities grow, so will demand for well-curated, explainable information. Regulators and customers expect transparency and accountability from AI systems, requiring clear documentation of information collection, processing, and usage in model training.
Your long-standing expertise in documentation, auditability, and lifecycle management becomes essential to meeting these expectations. You're uniquely positioned to lead this transformation, bridging the gap between compliance, operations, and innovation.
Building these systems requires multidisciplinary collaboration between IT teams, records managers, legal counsel, and business stakeholders. The AI initiative cannot be driven solely by technologists – it must be grounded in deep understanding of business goals, user needs, and regulatory context. This collaborative space is where information professionals become indispensable strategic partners.
The time to act is now:
- Audit your information comprehensively
- Implement robust protection and governance frameworks
- Organise information for AI accessibility
- Activate your information as a strategic weapon
In the past, information was something we kept "just in case" – a safeguard, a record, a compliance checkbox. But information's role is fundamentally changing. In the AI era, information becomes an engine of power that fuels growth, insight, and transformation. As usable public information dwindles, internal knowledge becomes the most valuable asset many organisations possess.
The future of AI won't just be trained on the internet. It will be trained on your organisation's unique knowledge, processes, and history. The question isn't whether this transformation will happen – it's whether you'll lead it or watch from the sidelines.
Meet your blog author:
Guy Holmes
As a serial entrepreneur, Guy has been known to get a bee in his bonnet about a problem, and then go out and find a way to solve it. After many years of working with magnetic tape in the oil and gas sector and magnetic tape vault storage, Guy has finally drawn a line in the sand on his stance on the issue of long term storage of legacy magnetic tapes. He is now profoundly against the practice and the bloated bottom lines of companies that provide the outdated service of expensive air-conditioned rooms and courier vehicles.