Almost 20 years ago Chris Humby coined the phrase “data is the new oil” and it has been repeated like a mantra ever since. “Data is the new oil” has come to define a generation of business thinking. Data has changed the way we think, and the way we pay for things.
Chris Humby was a data scientist before we knew that we needed data scientists. He worked with Tesco and found value in a place where no one else had looked: the weekly shop. Back then, each unremarkable purchase of toothpaste or bread was just that - unremarkable. Today we know differently. We now recognise the value in data that shows, for example, the purchase of nappies. We know that it indicates a high probability of household with a baby. Which in turn means a high probability of tired parents likely to redeem coupons against toys or premium brand nappies. And conversely, there’s no point offering money off toys or nappies to households without young children.
The result was the Tesco Clubcard which became a win-win for both consumers and Tesco. And, of course, Chris Humby didn’t do too badly out of it either. Together, they had struck oil.
Data needs to be refined
As with many catchy sayings, there’s more than a grain of truth in what he said. Like oil, valuable data is often hidden and needs research to be identified as such. And like crude oil, data also needs to be refined to be made useful. There was investment and experimentation in the Clubcard project before it became the success we know today.
Where is your data hidden?
A lot has happened since then, including of course AI. Whilst AI was around 20 years ago, it was not in the accessible format it is today. Azure AI Services make AI models available on a pay as you go basis, requiring an understanding of software engineering rather than machine learning to implement them.
But a lot of valuable data is still hidden. Some companies have made big investments in data analysis, but many have not. And almost all businesses have vast amounts of data in databases, spreadsheets, legacy systems, and many other places. This is data that no one has yet identified as valuable.
Competitive advantage in an AI world
In a world where AI makes general knowledge easier to access, competitive advantage will come from business-specific knowledge. That is, the knowledge that individual businesses or organisations have built up over time and is unique to their organisation and industry. This is company-confidential data that has value to decision-makers - provided it can be easily accessed when it’s needed.
Consider the needs of a medium sized business or department that wants to make in-house data easily available to their people. In the past, this might have been done using a combination of induction training, on-going training courses, operating manuals, and data shared on intranets.
ChatGPT has shown us a friendlier way to access data. AI now makes it much easier to access company data in the same way. Azure AI Search provides functionality to augment large language models like ChatGPT with domain specific data, such as company knowledge bases or information held in a database.
Azure AI Search
Azure AI Search enables advanced querying of different types of data. It has clever ways of indexing data, which enables better performance when querying the data. And it integrates with other Azure services to provide natural language processing.
It is no longer news that data has value. Now the question is how business should use their corporate data to best advantage. Azure AI Services, which includes Azure AI Search, puts better data within the reach of more businesses.
If you want to explore what Azure AI services could do you for you, then get in touch. We are Azure software developers with solid experience of software engineering and data manipulation. And we’d love to help you find your oil.
