
Its all about the data. There are some fascinating interactive visualisations avalable from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This chart shows the flow of Venture Capital (VC) investment in data startups by industry, from one country to another in 2022. These can be animated through time, 2023 showing growth in healthcare and robotics & sensors.
According to Preqin, “A data start-up is considered to be a private company that provides solutions for large volumes of data, through data gathering, storing, or analysis.”
These types of analyses on investment are by their nature, biased towards technology of course. Socio-technical academic research I published back in 2017 provided some evidence that the majority of the underlying causal factors for why people within organisations often cannot find the information they need are not technological.
It will be interesting to see what effects the recent technological advances such as Large Language Models (LLM) have on these research findings. They may:
1. Significantly transform the situation
2. Change it a little/not much
3. Cause new issues/problems or
4. A mixture of the above 3
Automation is happening, at the same time in my view the human and social components of managing data will expand.
The more AI we use, the more it has to be checked that it is doing what it is designed to be doing; and what it is designed to be doing, is really what we want it to be doing.
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