midden

This capability is critical as organizational knowledge walks out the door daily. 14.8 million workers are expected to retire between 2024 and 2029, cutting 10% of the workforce in 18 major sectors.30 Even worse, 57% of Baby Boomers say they have shared less than half the knowledge needed to do their jobs, and 21% admit they have shared none of it.31  Traditional knowledge transfer methods—documentation, training programs, mentorship—simply aren't keeping pace with knowledge loss. SOIs fight back by capturing, connecting, and preserving institutional knowledge automatically.

1. DataOps: The Foundation Layer Data is simultaneously the #1 moat for SORs and the #1 blocker for AI in the enterprise. This paradox defines the current moment: legacy systems hoard data behind rigid schemas and proprietary formats, while AI systems require rich, accessible, real-time context to function effectively.  In a recent study, 96% of analytics leaders reported being held back by data management challenges, including storage, access, quality, state, and flow of the data.22 33% of business users are not confident in the quality of data provided to them, and 44% don't have visibility into their data pipelines. But this challenge is also the opportunity.23 The best SOIs excel in the data layer through two key capabilities that traditional SORs cannot match.

The most successful SOI companies ensure that this magic is experienced by the customer during their first experience using the platform—the "first-contact." This typically manifests as pre-populated intelligence (Activant portfolio company Pallet combines TMS with AI workflows that automatically pre-fill data from emails and calls), instant problem resolution (Lightyear reduces months-long telecom projects to days through AI coordination), or invisible automation (Sardine makes thousands of fraud decisions per second without human intervention) that are highly superficial in the UI.

B. Unstructured Data Traditional SORs were designed around structured data entry—forms and fields that humans could populate. But the most valuable information exists in unstructured formats: emails, documents, video calls, chat messages, and informal interactions that actually drive business outcomes.

Even worse, the narrow band of structured data that SORs are built to capture is patchy at best. Sales teams under-update CRM systems; workflows depend on fields that are blank, outdated, or inconsistently used. Studies consistently show that critical fields in major SORs like Salesforce are incomplete 60-80% of the time. Enterprises today are flying blind, relying on brittle databases that reflect only a fraction of what is actually happening.