Ask your friends why they go to Vegas, and I'm sure you won't get the same answer twice. Casually surveying a few colleagues and friends yielded "the food and nightlife," "bachelor party weekend," "catching the Jerry Seinfeld show," "Calvin Harris is DJing," "CES conference," and…"rock climbing." What could these wide-ranging answers possibly have in common? Product development requires mid-term to long-term planning. It takes a long time to change a casino, experiment, and get a read on reception to those changes. Since the Great Recession, Las Vegas has come to Jesus.

Google, the company that democratized access to information and became a verb on data, has perhaps unsurprisingly jumped head-first into the self-driving car race. After putting in "3.5 million real-world miles on public roads," and "8 years self-driving in more than 20 US cities," according to CB Insights, "Waymo (spun out as a formal Alphabet company as of December 2016) began truly driverless testing last year and has now ordered thousands of new Chrysler Pacifica minivans ahead of its robotaxi service launch." They have partnerships lined up with Lyft, Avis, and Intel, among others. Car companies, from mainstays like GM to newcomers like Tesla, are heavily invested as well, along with ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft.

But lest we dismiss these employment concerns as the plight of workers without college or graduate degrees, consider the following: doctors, pharmacists, and lawyers may also be at risk. Robots are already working as surgeons' assistants, recently outperforming humans in a test to repair a pig's intestine. At the top-ranked medical school and medical center, UCSF, a robot has filled and dispensed prescriptions received by computers for years, making no errors in 350,000 orders. And in the legal realm, software programs can scan documents to find words or concepts that used to take lawyers hundreds of hours of document review. Developments to be viewed with as much thrill as trepidation: safer surgeries, more accurate prescriptions, and lower legal costs.

In this era of extreme data management, companies need to address massive sets of complex data at unparalleled speed, with streaming data analysis, visual foresight, streamlined machine learning, all orchestrated around an innovation-focused ecosystem. Without these things, it becomes impossible to maintain business in motion. Understanding this era of the data-driven economy, as so clearly articulated by Angela Merkel, it is incumbent upon us as business leaders and technologists to evolve our thinking around data to the point where data shapes our business strategies,drives our investments, and enables hyper growth. As such, whilst we see the growing importance of the role of the chief data officer and the data scientist, their work should be woven into the very fabric of our business strategy and operations.