Artificial intelligence (AI) is steadily becoming a familiar tool for many Australians. We have come to know it through our pocket voice assistants, like Siri and Alexa, and as the brains behind Google's predictive searches. Australian businesses, particularly in the mining sector, view it as a means to gain a competitive advantage, and we have even seen its potential to fight COVID-19. As AI begins to permeate every aspect of our lives, the Australian government has recognised the economic and social opportunities it affords us in its newly proposed AI Action Plan. The discussion paper, released on 29 October 2020, is the latest in a suite of Australian initiatives targeting AI regulation and development, following on from the AI Ethics Framework.

It is often said that data is the new oil; a valuable commodity that drives the operations of businesses everywhere. So vast is the volume and variety of data that flows through today's organisations that data lakes have now become one of the principal data management architectures. Storing all data of interest – both structured and unstructured - in one central repository, a data lake, makes discovery easier and reduces the time spent by data scientists on selection and integration. What's more, a data lake provides massive computing power, allowing the data it holds to be transformed and combined to meet the needs of any processes that require it. The success of this model was illustrated in the findings of a recent analyst report, which discovered that organisations employing a data lake were outperforming their peers by nine per cent in organic revenue growth.

Artificial intelligence has taken the news cycle by storm in recent years as major headway was achieved in some very important aspects of this precocious technology. AI is capable of just so many different things from managing a business marketing department to keeping you abreast of the news at home in the morning. It is an unspoken truth that AI is slowly incorporating itself into all major industries as well as our everyday lives. As a result, almost every developer on the planet is looking at AI to find an angle for entry. "The deep paradox uncovered by AI research: the only way to deal efficiently with very complex problems is to move away from pure logic," says Daniel Crevier.

Big Data constantly hits that wall. Despite all the investment in infrastructure and people, Big Data just can't generate further value. This is happening because we're treating Big Data and the stuff it contains like algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) just like we treat traditional information technology. From a high level, here is the wall. Brick 1 - Business knows business but doesn't understand AI.