Companies Are Collecting More Unstructured Data and Spending More to Manage It, Amid Mounting AI Challenges

Komprise, the leader in analytics-driven unstructured data management, announces the results of its annual industry survey. A whopping 85 percent of IT and data storage leaders are projecting an increase in data storage spend in 2026 while 74% are storing more than 5PB of unstructured data, a 57% increase over 2024, according to the Komprise 2026 State of Unstructured Data Management.

Unstructured data is central to enterprises across industries. For example:

• A bank that wants to detect fraud beyond what traditional monitoring can catch might use customer emails and chat transcripts, both of which are forms of unstructured data.
• A hospital that wants to improve early detection for high-risk patients might need access to physician and nurse notes and medical images (unstructured data) in electronic health records.
• AI tools and apps also rely heavily on unstructured data. For example, an e-commerce company that wants to automate and improve its customer support experience might use AI to sort through social media comments and reviews (unstructured data).

To cope with rising data volumes and outsized spending, enterprise IT infrastructure teams are looking to implement unstructured data classification. Survey respondents ranked this as the top strategy to discreetly understand data for storage optimization, data governance, ransomware defense, security and AI curation needs. In parallel, classifying and tagging unstructured data is the top challenge in prepping unstructured data for AI.

Among other trends, our survey shows that enterprises are bullish about increasing spending on AI-ready technology and talent, especially: modernizing and upgrading data storage and data management platforms and hiring AI infrastructure leaders.

Key Statistics:

Challenges & Priorities

• The top data storage priorities for the next year are cost optimization (64%), data preparation/classification for AI (61%) and cloud migration (54%).

• Top technical challenges for unstructured data management include classifying data for AI (58%) followed by moving data without disruption (53%).
• The top business challenge for unstructured data management is reducing data risk from AI (62%).
• The greatest data concern for generative AI is security, such as corporate data leakage (46%).
• Nearly half (47%) worry about departments lacking visibility into storage spend and data use.

• The top challenge in preparing data for AI is classifying and tagging (56%), compared with 41% in 2024. The second leading challenge is data governance and security concerns (46%).
• Future requirements for unstructured data management include data classification and tagging (61%) analytics and reporting (60%) and sensitive data detection (57%).
• The top skills gaps are AI data management (62%, versus  43% in 2024), cloud storage strategies (60%) and data security/compliance (49%).

Strategies for 2026

• The majority (40%) will increase their IT budget to pay for AI, compared with 30% in 2024.

• To meet security and AI requirements, IT leaders will invest in upgrading data storage/management platforms (64%), versus 53% in 2024.
• Two-thirds (58%) are creating an internal task force of IT, security, legal and others to develop an AI strategy.
• Nearly half will be adding staff, with a focus on hiring IT infrastructure leaders focused on developing the AI foundation (53%), along with hiring engineers and developers with AI expertise (49%).

“Unstructured data growth has reached a tipping point,” said Krishna Subramanian, co-founder, president and COO of Komprise. “IT organizations that do not take time to assess their data estates, growth rates, business priorities, security posture and IT resources may discover pains will outweigh the gains. Managing this data using the same methods, skills and tools of five to 10 years ago is no longer viable. It is time to reset unstructured data management strategies for the AI age.”

The complete Komprise 2025 Unstructured Data Management Survey results are here.

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