The Rise of AI in Data Collection: Implications and Opportunities for Businesses

Artificial intelligence has penetrated almost every sphere of life, from education to medicine, from art to entertainment, from customer service to streaming services suggestions. Data collection is no exception.

Today, any business, big or small, relies on data when making decisions, be it the perfect time for posting on social media or pricing strategies. Naturally, various means of gathering useful data have emerged in the last decade, web scraping is one of them. 

Web scraping is a popular method of gathering business intelligence, and now, enhanced by AI, it’s becoming more appealing to various companies.

What Is Web Scraping?

The term “web scraping” refers to the process of harvesting data from websites. In the past, it could be executed even manually, but today businesses prefer to turn to software that can do the job. 

Mostly, data extraction happens through proxies, and the results are converted into an appropriate format for data storage systems. This process has been around for years, and it helps businesses gather information on their competitors, customers, and market trends. The practice is especially popular in the e-commerce sector, but it’s widely applied within other sectors as well. 

Web scraping allows companies to figure out pricing, perfect product offerings, and many other crucial business-related questions. Also, a business can use web scraping to analyze the social media strategies of its competitors and determine their weak spots.

However, web scraping is not an easy process, bringing numerous challenges to those who use it. The internet is a vast ocean of data, and some websites are built with enormous complexity. These and other obstacles make web scraping a demanding task. That’s why it benefits from AI automation.  

How AI Improves Web Scraping

The current wave of hype around artificial intelligence is closely connected to Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a rapidly growing field of AI that focuses on the interaction between human language and computers. It involves teaching machines to understand, interpret, and respond to human language in a way that is similar to how humans communicate with each other. NLP has many applications, including chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT), text-to-image processing (e.g. Midjourney), and web scraping.

Since websites are created for humans and by humans, NLP is a highly efficient tool to automate web scraping because it can perceive the web similar to humans. It means that AI is able to understand and read correctly even complex layouts that other purely technological web scraping instruments can’t efficiently decode without the interference of a human. 

AI can recognize patterns and structures in web pages, quickly identify the relevant data and extract it in a structured format. Besides, websites are constantly updated, and AI algorithms can quickly adapt to new layouts and continue to collect data accurately. 

For example, an e-commerce company that wants to monitor its competitors’ prices can use NLP to extract data from their websites more accurately. Instead of relying on predefined rules to identify the price on a product page, the company can teach its web scraping tool to understand the context of the price, such as whether it is a sale price or a regular price, and extract the information accordingly.

How It Benefits Business

At Infatica, we are constantly working with ethical proxies and web scraping. Naturally, as we are a tech company, we are also excited about AI because it is another step toward improving the quality of web scraping. The latest impressive advancements of NLP and its growing availability for commercial use make it more accessible to businesses of all sizes.

AI web scraping tools can be scaled up or down based on the business’s needs. This means that businesses can extract data from a few websites or thousands of websites, depending on their requirements. This scalability can help businesses stay flexible and adapt to changing market conditions.

AI is currently revolutionizing numerous business processes. As for data collection, it helps businesses to extract useful data from websites quickly, accurately, and reliably, which improves their decision-making capabilities. Of course, it still has its challenges, and you need to ensure that the technology is used ethically and legally. Overall, AI-powered web scraping is a powerful tool that can help your company to stay ahead of its competitors.