Hospitals dust off old X-rays, telcos mine call records as AI revives dead data

\Hospitals are pulling old X-rays and imaging archives out of storage. Telecommunications firms are mining historical call and usage records. Government agencies are digitising decades of physical files. None of it is being done for compliance or record-keeping -- it is being done because artificial intelligence has turned data that organisations once considered dormant into training material, a report by IDC shows.

The study polled 763 information technology and business decision-makers across seven countries - the United States, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India, China, Japan and South Korea - on how AI adoption is reshaping enterprise data strategy.

As many as 75.9 per cent of organisations surveyed said they were increasing the volume of archived, "cold-tier" data being brought back online specifically to support AI workloads, with nearly a quarter of respondents describing the increase as significant, the report said.


Cold-tier data refers to information that is stored but rarely accessed or utilised.

"Customers are now storing previously discarded data in anticipation of future AI value extraction-old X-rays, archived records, and historical surveillance footage. No data should ever be thrown away," an IT decision-maker in the distribution and systems integration sector said.

According to the survey, nearly 95 per cent of respondents said the value of their organisation's data had increased as a result of AI and generative AI adoption.

The report said the trend was visible across sectors, citing examples of surveillance footage being reprocessed through computer vision models, telecommunications firms analysing historical records to train customer behaviour models, and hospitals consolidating old patient records and imaging archives into centralised repositories to feed AI systems, in some cases driven by government mandate.

Data released as part of the survey also showed that 74.3 per cent of organisations were retaining data for longer periods than before because of AI adoption, with a significant portion now setting aside a quarter or more of their total data holdings specifically for AI and analytics purposes.

The survey further found that more than 90 per cent of organisations were buying or selling more datasets than in previous years, with nearly half doing both - a trend the report's authors said pointed to data increasingly being treated as a direct commercial asset in its own right.

"Customers are beginning to treat data as core IP. Data that had no value two years ago is now a training asset - and nobody is throwing anything away," a senior storage industry executive said in the report.