A Long View On How Big Data And AI Have Transformed Business Culture

As my colleagues and I attend 3 major data and technology industry events in New York City this coming week – ML Ops, Finovate, and the granddaddy of them all, Strata Data Conference – it is interesting to note how far we have come in a few short decades. It may be hard to imagine today, but there was a time not too very long ago when data analysts, with a few notable exceptions, were relegated to the hidden recesses of most corporations. Better to toil away in the bowels than to be shown the light of day. For many decades, even as information technology (IT) emerged as a critical business function, data was viewed more as something that firms filed away in vaults for the mandatory seven years to comply with regulators, and not a business asset that could be mined to unlock critical business insights. Data was perceived as the purview of those who were sometimes derisively referred to as data geeks or "propeller heads". This was long before Silicon Valley, or Wall Street, embraced the term "geek".