Data monetization opportunity for Legacy firms

There is a lot of buzz around AI and its transformational impact on every business in every industry. Simon Greenman’s article does a great job of laying out the AI landscape and the 3.5 Trillion opportunity AI promises to deliver by 2022.

While AI technology will be commoditized and consolidate, companies sitting on tons of data could be the largest beneficiaries of the AI driven windfall. Many companies may not realize today that they are in fact a data business and with some bold steps they could join the AI gold rush.

A few years back, when I was selling analytics solutions to various industries, I had an interesting conversation with a US based beef manufacturer. This firm was looking at ways to monetize their data. Although we had several conversations about how they could monetize data, we mostly discussed data syndication opportunities and eventually that conversation died.

If I were to have that conversation today, I would have suggested they build a platform with pre-trained machine/ deep learning models that anyone in the beef ecosystem could use. Examples of the models could be a Demand and Price model, impact of Organic meat introduction on non-organic meat, changing dietary trends and many such insights the industry could benefit from. Through the concept of “Transfer learning”, the whole eco-system could become smarter and more efficient, without having to invest in huge AI infrastructure.

Healthcare is another such industry and large players whether they are Providers, Payers or Pharma could be extracting intelligence buried in their enormous, often disparate data infrastructure, and serving out Pre-Trained models for consumption by a much larger eco-system in the industry.

There are questions of course on how much money such opportunities would yield. The worthiness of such an opportunity would hence be directly proportional to the real world problem they address.

 The bolder the aspirations, the bigger will be the payoffs.