Artificial intelligence generates reams of data, but generating results means you need to separate wheat from chaff and focus on metrics that matter.

The growth in available data and potential from analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) technology increases both the opportunity – and the challenge – for asset managers, investor relations professionals, and corporate management teams.

• Analytics can influence corporate decisions in product management, capital allocation, and how equity shareholders impact share pricing. The size and scope strains comprehension:
• Approximately 20 billion Internet of Things devices are now online. By 2025, the number is expected to rise to 75 billion devices.
• There will be 4.8 billion internet users by 2022, up from 3.4 billion in 2017. 80 percent of data will be unstructured by 2025.
• More stored data has been created in the last two years than in the history of mankind prior to that point.
• Financial services firms are increasingly using this data to predict business model outcomes and set equity prices. We continue to hear these statistics, but our eyes often gloss over given the challenge of understanding the disciplines required to integrate all this data. We need five skills and tools to unlock the value of this data and use it our advantage:
  1. Business knowledge of where value is created for the end customer.
  2. The devices and sources of data and their biases.
  3. Statistical and mathematical approaches to calculating what is known, and properly derisking what is not.
  4. Technology software and architecture requirements.
  5. Cultural and organizational awareness and mutual respect for blending those respective skills into tangible workflow.

Thankfully, just as we saw with public cloud adoption, new “no code” tools and services are becoming available to make the scale and transparency of technology magic available to the business user who understands the core value proposition. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology calls the knowledge made possible by this technology “shared intelligence.” Early adopters have the opportunity to separate from the pack as Amazon did with its public cloud computing service and successful e-commerce businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic creates a further imperative to take action on these types of opportunities.