Our subject for this weekend’s Hashtag Trending interview is “Digging deep on data and AI”

I’ve been looking forward to this discussion for a while now – since our guest accepted my invite.  I wanted to talk about the reality of data — not from a theoretical basis, but with someone who’s “sleeves rolled up” involved with it.

We keep hearing that data is our biggest asset.  Data is the new oil. Whatever.  And companies have a lot of data.  And through the internet in this digital age, they have access to a lot more.

The problem is that having access and being able to use that data are not the same thing.  Most companies really only can use  10 or 15% of their data. The rest is referred to as “dark data”. Why?

We’ve heard the reasons. It’s unstructured. It’s unorganized.  It’s inaccurate or incomplete.  Lots of reasons.

This is why data initiatives underperform or outright fail.

We’ve all heard a lot of how new solutions using things like AI can help us solve this problem.  But can they really?  Every AI expert I’ve heard to date starts with the idea that success in AI comes from labelling or tagging your data properly.  As someone who works on this incessantly for our own analytics – its easier said than done.  Getting people to accurately label data is a tough thing to do.   Going back and labelling terabytes of data seems laughable.

So this is the conundrum.  How do we deal with the reality of data. This is where our guest comes in.

Niklas Lindstrom is one of the co-founders of a company called UnitQ. Nik’s team and their solution take in an incredible amount of unstructured data from multiple sources across the internet and social media.

We talk about the problem with data. What are the challenges from Nicks point of view?  When he was looking at building your solution what did he have to consider in terms of the data they were trying to use?

More importantly, we ask Nick how he addressed these challenges?

We talk about labelling or of having good meta data. Is that even possible?  We discuss what AI can do and what CAN’T it do.

We don’t promise all the answers from this discussion, but hopefully there will be some learning for someone who is trying to put together a data program or fix and existing one.

We’d love to hear what you thought about the program and any comments and suggestions.  You can catch me at jlove@itwc.ca  that’s jlove@itwc.ca  or you can find me on LinkedIn as therealjimlove

If you know of someone or some topic you’d like to see us explore, drop me a note.

Hashtag Weekend is produced by the ITWC podcast network.  You can follow us on Apple or Google Podcasts or Spotify – or anywhere you get your podcasts.  You can even get us on your Alexa or Google smart speaker.

I’m Jim Love, our producer is James Roy.   Our associate producer is Krystle McLean.  See you next week for another Hashtag Weekend.