Accenture has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in Stardog, a leading enterprise knowledge graph platform enabling organizations to do more with, and achieve greater value from, their data in this age of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Stardog Enterprise Knowledge Graphs, with their ability to make real-world context machine-understandable, are used by companies to facilitate better enterprise data integration and unification. Instead of integrating data by combining tables, data is unified using a knowledge graph’s ability to endlessly link concepts—without changing the underlying data. This ability to unify data serves to connect data silos and produces a flexible data layer across the entire enterprise.
Generative AI and the Large Language Models (LLMs) that underpin the technology have captured global interest and excitement for their ability to instantly retrieve comprehensive answers to users’ questions. A knowledge graph coupled with a fine-tuned LLM enables users to ask questions and draw information contextualized with the user’s domain and data. This functionality benefits users who want to explore data their own way, while also giving enterprise engineering teams the ability to extract structured data efficiently and meaningfully from documents.
“For most large enterprises, the real value of generative AI will come from customizing and fine-tuning large language models and using their own collected data to address their unique business needs,” said Tom Lounibos, managing director, Accenture Ventures. “Foundation models need vast amounts of curated data to learn and that makes solving the data challenge an urgent priority for every business. This is precisely where Stardog’s Enterprise Knowledge Graphs can make a difference by helping organizations unify and optimize their data for this new era of generative AI.”
According to Accenture research, 97% of global executives agree that foundation models will enable connections across data types, revolutionizing where and how AI is used. Nearly all (98%) business leaders agree AI foundation models will play an important role in their organization’s strategies over the next three to five years.
”Stardog’s knowledge graphs help organizations use, interact with, and unlock more valuable insights from their data by enabling them to have highly customized and contextualized conversations with data from across the enterprise,” notes Teresa Tung, chief technologist at Accenture Cloud First. “They provide organizations with a programmatic framework that essentially acts as a data interpreter, translating data into more meaningful inputs.”
Stardog is the latest startup to join Accenture Venture’s Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program that targets emerging technology companies that can help fill strategic innovation gaps for the Global 2000. In addition to capital investments, Accenture Venture’s Project Spotlight offers unprecedented access to Accenture’s technology domain expertise and its enterprise clients. Technology companies co-innovate with Accenture at its Innovation Hubs, Labs and Liquid Studios, working with subject matter experts to adapt their solutions to the enterprise market and scale faster and more effectively.
“Organizations today need to adopt a semantic approach to their enterprise data; otherwise, they will face an endless battle with data silos and data sprawl,” said Kendall Clark, co-founder and CEO of Stardog. “Our technology makes it easier for organizations to create and use a semantic layer for enterprise data analytics, which in turn can accelerate their strategic data integration efforts and enhance the productivity of their data engineers and data scientists. We look forward to helping Accenture clients achieve their data unification goals so they can take advantage of generative AI advancements and make knowledge-informed decisions faster."
