Data science’s commercialization over the last decade emphasized the science more than the data. Even as data scientists spent most of their time wrangling and cleaning data, it was their algorithms that gave their organizations a competitive advantage. This industry model had a significant flaw that ultimately caught up with commercial data science, though. Algorithms are just math – incredibly clever and complex math, but still math.
This commoditized the algorithms. A market-leading company’s black box algorithm full of rainbows and unicorns is – or soon will be – fundamentally the same “magic” that their competitors are using.
This opens a significant opportunity for any company that shifts the focus of their data science initiatives from the science to the data. Explorium’s CEO and co-founder Maor Shlomo highlighted one such company at the Gartner Data & Analytics Conference.