After several years as a startup, we seem finally to have gotten large and popular enough that management and legal are looking at how we store and segregate our user data. To say this feels like a fire drill would be understating it. Everyone now seems to have an opinion on how we should handle user data. Meetings on this topic would be funny if they were not so tragic. It is not as if we are a huge company that claims billions of users, and, of course, it is important to protect our customers' data.

There is a lot of talk about the fourth industrial revolution centered around AI. If we are at the start of the fourth industrial we also have the unusual honour of being the first to name our revolution before it's occurred. The technology that has driven the revolution in AI is machine learning. And when it comes to capitalising on the new generation of deployed machine learning solutions there are practical difficulties we must address. In 1987 the economist Robert Solow quipped "You can see the computer age everywehere but in the productivity statistics".