Did you miss a session at the Data Summit? This article is contributed by Brian Gilmore, director of IoT Product Management at InfluxData. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a concept that gets batted around freely these days. Generally, the public tends to think of campy popular science fiction depictions of AI. We tend to use AI as a category heading, an umbrella term that includes various technologies of vast complexity.

These are heady times for InfluxDB, which is the world's most popular time-series database, which has been the fastest growing category of databases the past two years, per DB-Engines.com. But when Paul Dix and his partner founded it a decade ago, the company behind the time-series database and the product itself and looked much different. In fact, InfluxDB went through several transformations to get to where it is today, mirroring the evolution of the time-series database category. And more change appears on the horizon. Dix and Todd Persen co-founded Errplane, the predecessor to InfluxData, back in June 2012 with the idea of building a SaaS metrics and monitoring platform, à la Datadog or New Relic.

Time is a critical context for understanding how things function. It serves as the digital history for businesses. When you think about institutional knowledge, that's not just bound up in people. Data is part of that knowledge base as well. So, when companies can capture, store and analyze that data in an effective way, it produces better results.