Insights offered by data can help create solutions to business problems. But managing big data can overwhelm rather than help.

Kavitha Prasad, Intel

"There's so much data that's lying around in everything that we are doing, and now the amount of data that is getting generated is so much. But how do you get meaningful insights out of this data?" Kavitha Prasad, Intel's vice president and general manager of Datacenter, AI, and cloud execution and strategy, told ZDNet. s

"It's beyond humanly possible right now to sit down with the data and figure out not just what the data is saying, but the interrelationship between the different sets of data that is getting collected, and to figure out what business insights are hidden behind this data."

This issue doesn't just impact tech companies. The education sector also faces challenges in managing, protecting, and extracting value from big data.

How can schools deploy AI to improve student outcomes?

Artificial intelligence can make it possible to solve big data problems. 

For example, Intel collaborated with Aible to use AI to help Nova Southeastern University. Aible can sense, explore, and optimize data through AI. 

Prasad said the university wanted data-based insight on two primary issues: Improving undergraduate student retention and optimizing student welfare. Intel and Aible, in collaboration with Dell, deployed AI on the school's data sets. This project identified ways to potentially lower student attrition by 17% in 15 days. 

 Don Rudawsky, Nova Southeastern's vice president of institutional effectiveness, wrote in an Aible case study highlighting the project: 

During a one-hour meeting, we went from a raw dataset to exploring insights in the data automatically highlighted by Aible, to creating and even deploying a predictive model. The collaboration with academic and financial aid advisors helped us further optimize the models and made them more useful