What’s your currency conversion rate for data?

If you’ve been reading my posts recently you’ll be familiar with my business strategy model. It looks like this.

As is the way of doing things these days, I’ve iterated the model in-line with a very simple concept that’s been bouncing around my head for some weeks.

Fairly soon, data will become currency.

There are a few forces at play that will bring this about.

• Increasing consumer awareness & acceptance of personal data exchange
• Legislation is being introduced to give more control back to the consumer
• AI as a service is already here
• Intelligent Assistants are already acting as gatekeepers to your data and privacy
• Data is a fundamental asset to deliver sustained business growth
• Blockchain technology has given us smart contracts

Businesses need our data to help them make more money. The value exchange we see today is incredibly opaque and represents poor value to consumers e.g. e-mail address in exchange for ability to play Pokemon Go. People are getting smarter about the fact that our data is worth something. Soon enough we’ll stop handing it over so easily.

So what’s it worth to you?

This is an incredibly complex question that you need to start asking now. When data becomes currency, companies that know how to value data will win.

Value of data is contextually unique for every business

Do you know what it’s worth to you?

Your ability to process data and turn it into something that creates business value is unique to you based on your business strategy, infrastructure, people, cash reserve and so on.

Business A could turn dataset Y into $10M incremental revenue in the next 5 years while Business B might only turn it into $10,000.

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure

Social networking data, mobile phone location data, mobile phone data usage data, smart home meter data, transaction data, credit data, entertainment consumption data, smart fridge data… and so on.

Following on from the above; every different type of data is going to have a different value to your business. It’s super creepy, but I can see every business having their own equivalent to a stock ticker that’s tracking the second-to-second value of different consumer data types.

Taking it further, it’s an organic leap to seeing that information powering high frequency trading in the next generation of data exchanges. Ones that go beyond what ads you’ve seen and clicked and contain every piece of personal data you’re willing to trade.

DataEx will be baked into pricing models

When you’ve figured out how much something is worth to you, you can buy it. Buying it can and will come in every flavour imaginable.

Free delivery, free Amazon Prime, £xx off your next iPhone, 10 free Uber rides per month, £xx paid into your Stock ISA each month. If you can imagine it, it will happen. A bit like Rule 34, but less kinky.

Smart Contracts will create scarcity and automate the DataEx

Some businesses will be happy to have access to certain parts of your data. Some businesses will want to try to make certain parts of your data behave like proprietary data by making it inaccessible to every other business.

Imagine your data being made accessible via an API to the agreed third party that’s buying it from you. They’ve paid you a 100% premium on the ‘shared access’ price to prevent you from selling that same data to any other company for the duration of the Smart Contract.

You can end your contract at any time. All you have to do is sell that same data to someone else. The nano-second you do, you break your first smart contract and it automatically stops payment.

Intelligent assistants will be the consumer-side data brokers

This is starting to sound like it’s getting messy. Smart contracts and average consumers don’t go together that well in my mind. That is, unless you add a really helpful presentation layer like an intelligent assistant. These little guys are going to help their operators get the best deals they can for their data. There will be discrete datasets that their operators don’t care about that the assistants might trade in a fully automated way.

The big ticket datasets are likely to be hotly contested for, leaving you asking yourself whether or not you’d prefer free delivery for a year or £100 off your next iPhone.

Tangential business growth is going to be epic

Amazon is already pretty good at this. See Amazon Basics, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Turks, Amazon Fresh and so on. Being able to access datasets that you’d never have any right to look at previously is going to help tangential business innovation.

Why does Amazon want my home’s smart meter data? Who cares? I want me some free Amazon Prime.

The next iteration of the business growth model

Maybe a triangle or a circle would look nicer. But the heart of it will always be making the connection between need and use. Because that’s what every business exists to do.