Not that long ago organisations were being urged to'just get started' – to set up a dream team of data scientists and protect them from the rest of the company, letting them get on with developing proofs of concept and allowing them to fail or succeed fast. Those carefree days are over. The time has come to operationalise AI across organisations at scale and to start deriving clear business benefits, including improved customer service and ROI from time and money already spent. Beyond that, the pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated digitalisation – compressing years into months – and data-first, AI-enabled organisations are the ones that are going to succeed in the future. In a way, AI needs to become boring.

BIG DATA and analytics have been around for so long, that sometimes, they sound like'technologies' from a previous generation. Especially with all the talk around using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to make more sense of all the data that today's businesses collect. However, no business can implement an AI or ML solution without the right digital infrastructure in place. Big data and business analytics, therefore, are simply a part of the digital maturity curve that organizations must climb in order to leverage AI and ML -- and leapfrog ahead of the competition. But this isn't to diminish the value of big data or analytics in any way.