Episode 437: Nasuni and AI-Ready Unstructured Data with Nick Burling

About this episode

Welcome to Episode 437 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Nick Burling, Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, joins Ben and Scott to talk about getting unstructured file data ready for AI. Nick digs into why 70 to 80 percent of enterprise data sits in file shares and object storage, how that data tends to end up ungoverned and risky to point AI at, and Nasuni’s PSYCHIC framework for making it proprietary, secure, current, indexed, hybrid, and continuous. The conversation covers Nasuni’s AI Activate, the MCP based service that enforces permissions before a query ever runs, and the recent DryvIQ acquisition, which adds content classification, redaction, and policy enforcement on top of that index. They also get into where this overlaps with Purview and Copilot’s own indexing, how DriveIQ reads and respects Microsoft’s existing sensitivity labels, and why 97 percent of orgs are piloting AI agents while only 43 percent call those projects successful. Nick closes with practical advice for anyone evaluating a platform like this: pick one high value use case, define success metrics up front, and keep the initial scope small. Discosure: This is a sponsor interview with