Data is the New Oil, AI is the New Electricity, who is building the New Railroads?

This title is inspired partly by a conversation with Sachin Shenoy (others have used it before) and a talk by Andrew Ng.

Data is the New Oil

We produce today more data every year than all previous years combined. In fact we have gone rapidly from a world of kilobytes of data (10³) to megabytes (10⁶) to gigabytes (10⁹) to zettabytes (10²¹) to now yottabytes 10²⁴).

This growth is unsurprisingly being driven primarily by mobile devices and it’s being driven by every region in the world.

AI is the New Electricity

It is not a hype if the pace of investments and deals continues the same growth pattern year over year for over 5 years.

And it’s not like a few companies are skewing the trends, all the stages of maturity of a startup have been receiving roughly equal attention. Which means entrepreneurs and investors across the spectrum are seizing the opportunity.

Who is building the New Railroads?

As we enter the age of IoT — everything is connected — data will explode even further. Many would argue that AI is the answer. And there has definitely been a tremendous growth in computing power that can support this.

But lest we achieve the Singularity I would argue we need a third leg to this stool, let’s call it railroads. Ways to structure the data and deploy the electricity. Index “dark data” which by some estimates comprises 95% of all our creations. Electrified trains that carry the oil. That pick up users at the right stations and get them to the destinations they want to go.

Who builds these railroads?

These are purposely short articles focused on practical insights (I call it gl;dr — good length; did read). I would be stoked if they get people interested enough in a topic to explore in further depth. I work for Samsung’s innovation unit calledNEXT, focused on early-stage venture investments in software and services in deep tech, all opinions expressed here are my own.