Tag: data

From “Data is Oil” to “AI is Electricity” : A decade of evolution

Data is Oil, AI is new electricity
A decade of evolution.

This one slide sums up a decade (2006-2016) of evolution in the areas of data processing, analysis, computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Clive Humby, UK Mathematician and architect of Tesco’s Clubcard, said in 2006 (widely credited as the first to coin the phrase): “Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”

Andrew Ng gave the phrase “AI is the new Electricity” in 2016. “Electricity changed how the world operated. It upended transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, health care. AI is poised to have a similar impact” he said. Information technology, web search, and advertising are already being powered by artificial intelligence. It decides whether we’re approved for a bank loan. It helps us order a pizza and estimate our wait time, and even tells the driver where to deliver it. Other areas ripe for AI impact: fintech, logistics, health care, security, and transportation.

“Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years,” Ng says.

Innovation eats data for breakfast

I read this amazing article from Prof. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge on Harvard Business Review. Follow the link here – https://hbr.org/2018/02/are-the-most-innovative-companies-just-the-ones-with-the-most-data

They have made an excellent case for a data driven innovation. Citing examples of how Google, Apple and Amazon are using data to further innovation and outsmarting not just their existing competitors but also the startups, they have made it very clear that the future innovation will be owned by enterprises which are able to leverage AI in generating insights from the data and not just rely purely on human ingenuity.

I am sharing here the two adjustments, they mentioned about, that enterprises need to make:

First, they need to reposition themselves in the data value chain to gain and secure data access. Second, as innovation moves from human insight to data-driven machine learning, firms need to reorganize their internal innovation culture, emphasizing machine learning opportunities and putting in place data exploitation processes.

Now, one interesting point to ponder about is – what do we mean by data really ? In all of their examples it means the data generated by users which is being used by large corporations to generate insights for improving their products or services.

What does it mean for companies whose product or services are not consumed or delivered online ? eg. Pharmaceuticals

In that case they need to look at the data that is publicly available. Thankfully, there is a lot of data that is available publicly eg. information on clinical trials, research publications, disclosures to regulatory bodies, reviews from regulatory bodies, data from different scientific congresses across the world, theses from universities, patents from major patent bodies globally, data from major global regulatory bodies etc.

In the context of the second adjustment above, enterprises need to leverage AI to automate not just the collection and curation of data but also the generation of insights, specific to key processes, from the data. Entire Drug Development process is very long and complex, with a lot of tasks / processes which are repetitive in nature or involve a lot of manual content reviews at each step. It is up to the enterprises to empower their teams to step up the value chain from doing manual analysis of data to being the domain specialists who can partner with Data Scientists to come up with good training data sets, to validate the output of these algorithms and to be the data quality supervisors.

In the end, it will only improve the overall satisfaction of employees as they will free to solve real problems instead of clerical tasks, which ultimately leads to happier and more productive workplace.

P.S. The title (Innovation eats data for breakfast) is just a pun on the famous “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, a phrase coined by the legendary Peter Drucker.