Put down the Excel spreadsheet

When I worked at a manufacturing plant in Montreal 15 years ago, I had a 60Mb excel file that took 5 minutes to open. I loved that file (I actually sent it to myself before I quit).
I was responsible for 4 production departments and was trying to find ways to improve efficiency. As an engineer, my instincts were to dive head-first into the data, but the problem was a) being an engineer did not make me a data scientist; b) MS Excel, although super fun, is not the right tool to analyze data; and c) once I did figure something out, it was way too late to fix it. Today we have way more data but people still spend their day fiddling with vlookups and pivot tables trying to see the matrix.

Apparently 90% of the world’s data was created in the past 2 years. By now, it’s likely much higher. The biggest driver for this massive increase is that “things” — Industrial things, wearable things, mobile things, things that make toast (not kidding) are now producing data. This will continue to grow rapidly, and the crazy thing is that most of this data is not being used. Conceptually, the idea of having all this data is awesome.
Collect all the data, see all, know all, and become a Jedi master.
The problem is that we don’t know what to do with the data so barely any of it gets used.
Collecting and analyzing data fundamentally provides no value. Value is achieved when somebody actually changes their behavior based on the data.
For practical folk, this realization comes pretty quickly. But the lure of data is strong, especially in business. We intuitively know data is powerful, but we don’t know how to use it. The tool of choice for data analysis is the same as it was 15 years ago: MS Excel.
If data analysis is like mowing a lawn, Excel is a dull push mower. You are disturbing the grass more than cutting it.
Applying artificial intelligence to these massive data sets can unlock massive potential. Today, if the data set is manageable, basic statistics still have their place. As the data gets bigger and more complex, applying standard approaches to this data won’t work. AI will gain traction more and more as it get applied to technologies that drive actionable behavior. Excel does not have the capability to prescribe actions and that is why it is used as a tool. AI can be used as a guide. It will unlock huge amounts of capacity by removing the burden of inefficient data collection and reporting.

A lot of the AI chatter is about stuff that will happen in the future. The shocking fact is that 45% of the work done by the US workforce can be replaced by technology ready today.
We also use AI on a daily basis. It’s amazing how fast we switched over from maps to GPS. AI will strengthen our capability innocuously through companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Telsa. Leveraging exponentially more data than we ever have while doubling the capacity of the US workforce will change everything.
Exciting times.
My name is Martin Cloakte, founder/CEO of Raven, artificial intelligence for manufacturing. I also tweet at @martin_cloake
