I went to the Data Expo in Utrecht yesterday. It’s an annual trade fair for companies that provide digital and data-related services in the Netherlands. I went there to update myself on the latest developments in the market, to see how they would impact companies creating and executing their digital strategies.
I visited 16 stands out of the 100, so there was a lot that I didn’t see, but here’s what I learned:
- Data more than AI: AI got plenty of attention, but data is still the bigger topic. What to do with it, how to collect it, how to manage it and how to get value out of it.
- Business value first: Consultants and solution providers starting from the company goals, and defining the use case that adds value before collecting and processing data. This is a pleasant change from approaches I recall from five years ago, that wanted to start data-first and see what came out second, which has never sat well with me.
- Cloud is standard: It’s become like electricity, it’s there and migrating to the cloud is no longer a topic of conversation.
- Data management: Many solutions were bringing together data from many sources into one repository, making sure it was reliable, consistent and in a format that could be reused in different applications.
- Analytics for insights: Either through standard BI or through custom dashboards, the analytics focused on taking the next steps into insights, sometimes with the help of AI to summarise or highlight certain aspects.
- Specific AI models: The examples that I saw were custom-built models that were able to perform specific tasks, rather than a generic ‘ChatGPT for everything’ approach. Admittedly, I did go around asking people what they actually used AI for.
Zoho Analytics had a live demo of their AI tool and I could ask it in natural language to create a chart or analysis. It could only create those that the AI already knew about, so it could show me a trendline, but not calculate year-on-year growth. I expect that will improve over time. - Local expertise: The fair was full of local companies showcasing local expertise. Whether it was the use cases, or the knowledge of the local context, the biggest lesson for me was that if you want to improve how you work with data as a Dutch company, there are plenty of companies with a lot of real-world expertise right next door.
© Veridia Consulting, 2024
