How Emerging Technologies Are Creating a Race for Insights

Businesses are racing to invest in AI technology to improve their ability to obtain valuable insights – quicker. Dell Technologies’ Realizing 2030 study found that 81% of businesses in APJ are investing or planning to invest in advanced AI technology, and that 75% of APJ leaders plan to appoint a Chief AI Officer to further accelerate that growth.

There are a few industries already on a path to success by investing in AI and ML, as they seek to accelerate time-to-insights. According to IDC, the retail and finance industries were the biggest spenders on AI systems in 2017. Healthcare will soon use AI to comb through vast genome databases and calculate the probabilities of contracting specific diseases or conditions. Meanwhile, the insurance industry is set to be transformed by AI, using sensors to track activity and driving styles and calculating tailored premiums based on an accurate and real-time analysis of individuals’ behaviours and lifestyles.

Investing in emerging technology right now doesn’t mean the challenges of processing data will disappear. Success with AI and ML is predicated on providing the right platform with the right data to generate reliable insights, which often involves a diverse range of information from multiple systems. As data continues to grow and evolve in ways that businesses cannot always fully anticipate, it will require new strategies to ensure infrastructure is able to anticipate and accommodate this.

Another challenge will be to maximize value creation while simultaneously ensuring compliance with an increasing number of regulations, policies and laws governing data. For example, very few organizations will be building their own AI functions from scratch, and will instead leverage technologies and applications provided via a third-party service-provider’s API. It’s important to understand how these APIs are being used, what they cost, and – for instance – how much data of varying sensitivity is transiting the public internet and being temporarily stored in public cloud data centres along the way.

Businesses need to build a strategic and holistic approach in order to navigate this environment of unprecedented change – and to harness the full value of these exciting emerging technologies.That approach has to be built first and foremost on an effective audit of what data is available, as well as what new data might become available as a result of new products or services. In addition, collaboration across the business is essential to accurately establish what value is needed or possible. This fact-finding mission will provide a strong foundation,enabling the extraction of meaningful data with the potential to genuinely accelerate the business.

From a technology perspective, the primary principles of effective data management are to modernize, automate, and transform core IT processes. A modern, scale-out architecture that can provide cost-effective tiered storage, with in-place data protection and analytics, is the core of the modern data centre. With these factors at play, and a high level of automation and data governance, organizations can effectively harness the value – and significant power – of data capital.