How To Scale The AI Ladder

Ben Bottelberge, Data, Analytics and AI leader for East & West Africa IBM gave a presentation at the Africa Fintech Summit on how companies can monetize their data and scale the AI ladder.

Businesses are happy to have more data about their operations, customers, and the results of strategy implementation. The only problem is that, once they have it, they may not know exactly what to do with all that information.

Not knowing the best way to read, understand, and apply data can actually be costing a business a significant amount of money or opportunity. More specifically, those costs could take the form of lost revenue opportunities, lower efficiency and productivity, quality issues, and more. For example, Forrester reports that between 60 per cent and 73 per cent of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. And that’s despite the fact that more companies are talking about big data, using technology to capture more data, and acknowledging the value of this information.

Today, many industrial and manufacturing companies are using equipment that records vast volumes of sensor data. Unfortunately, these same companies are not putting that data to good use. One costly area they should be targeting is downtime, which can happen suddenly and cause a huge hit to productivity. If companies were using their data to predict downtime, they could plan appropriately and maintain, or even increase, productivity.

Now, it’s not that companies are intentionally misusing their data. They are simply trying to understand what it is that they have, which is understandable considering the high volumes of complex data their equipment is pumping out. They need to know where to look within the data.

The best business performers are data and AI-driven. While many organizations are struggling with the challenges of data complexity, there are some organizations that are finding success as they embrace a modern data strategy. Data-savvy organisations are more likely to use data in a manner that informs decision-making, and strategically addresses unmet needs with new data-driven business models. When you provide organization-wide access to previously siloed data, configure governance policies, and address data quality concerns, you are ready to make large strategic AI investments that ultimately lead to outperforming revenue targets and increasing profitability.

Ben Bottelberge, Data, Analytics and AI leader for East & West Africa IBM gave a presentation at on how companies can monetize your data and scale the AI ladder.