AI Weekly: Data analytics keeps attracting investment through the pandemic
source link: https://venturebeat.com/2021/04/16/ai-weekly-data-analytics-keeps-attracting-investment-through-the-pandemic/
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AI Weekly: Data analytics keeps attracting investment through the pandemic
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Organizations are investing more in data analytics during the pandemic, according to a paper from West Monroe. A recent survey by KPMG agrees, with C-suite executives reporting that data and analytics platforms are the most common new technology to be adopted and 21% of respondents reporting their company was piloting AI and machine learning solutions.
Driving the trend is a growing realization that AI can help enterprises maximize returns on investments in tech by mining the most insights from data. For example, AI can be used to spotlight which parts of a website customers are likely to pay attention to or help retailers understand what their customers are likely to purchase.
“A positive trend to come out of the pandemic was that organizations recognized that data was so important,” Amazon VP Sandy Carter told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “A lot of them came to the realization that they needed more insights in order to make the right decisions.”
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How analyzing data can help
Indeed, most organizations have to wrangle countless data buckets — some of which have long gone underused. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion by 2020. That’s perhaps why organizations have taken an interest in solutions that ingest, understand, organize, and act on digital content from multiple digital sources.
These analytics workloads are largely being processed in the cloud, which offers flexibility in how — and when — they can be executed. IDG reports that the average cloud budget is up from $1.62 million in 2016 to a whopping $2.2 million today. A Lemongrass survey found that IT leaders were motivated to migrate systems by their need to secure data, maintain data access, save money, optimize storage resources, and accelerate digital transformation.
Carter gave the example of Splunk, which worked with the City of Los Angeles to build a data analytics solution for over 40 different agencies. The city wanted to take the 240 million records those agencies create daily and use that data, along with other city data, to gain insights. Specifically, city officials wanted to evaluate cyber threats.
Hacks and breaches have surged in the past year, due in large part to the pandemic. Canalys found that more records were compromised from March 2020 to March 2021 than in the previous 15 years combined. In one scary example, in February hackers attempted to poison a Florida city water supply by remotely accessing a server. And in 2015 and 2016, cyberattacks caused large-scale power outages in Ukraine.
With the help of Splunk and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Carter says the City of Los Angeles is now able to evaluate 100 million threats each month using analytics and share the data throughout all 40 of its agencies.
Benefits and barriers
Some organizations continue to encounter barriers to adopting data analytics, however. Respondents to the Lemongrass survey pegged security and compliance as the top issues facing enterprises when moving legacy systems to the cloud. Separate research by Alation and Wakefield Research found that data quality issues contributed to failed implementations of AI and machine learning.
Carter says that one AWS customer, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was largely unaware of what AI and data might bring to the table. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security agency, which administers the country’s naturalization and immigration system, expressed an eagerness to apply machine learning models to its data but had no specific goals in mind. With the help of Amazon, the agency determined which insights might be useful to its employees, like the percentage of likely no-shows to appointments and the number of applications in the next year.
Successful migration to the cloud can lead to a wealth of benefits, surveys show. For example, according to OpsRamp, the average savings from cloud migration comes to around 15% on all IT spending. Small and mid-sized businesses benefit the most, as they spend 36% less on IT that way. Moreover, 59% of companies report an increase in productivity after migrating apps and services to the cloud, Microsoft says.
“If you’re going to use analytics and you’re going to use machine learning, the cost structure, on-demand, and agile nature of the cloud makes sense,” Carter said. “A lot of organizations … hustled to get their data to the cloud because they knew that without building, storing, and managing that in a data lake, use of analytics and machine learning would be inhibited.”
For AI coverage, send news tips to Kyle Wiggers — and be sure to subscribe to the AI Weekly newsletter and bookmark our AI channel, The Machine.
Thanks for reading,
Kyle Wiggers
AI Staff Writer
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Email is the answer to the death of cookies for digital publishers
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Register NowPresented by Jeeng
For years, digital publishers have relied on third-party cookies to help them learn about audience behavior in a sort of ad hoc, outsourced data strategy. By relying on ad targeting through cookies, they could also infer a bit about their site visitors’ preferences and behavior.
But publishers didn’t actually own that data; they only borrowed it from third-party ad servers. And, thanks to privacy concerns — most notably the fact that site visitors had no idea they were being tracked — cookies have now come under fire and will soon be obsolete as the web’s mostly widely-used browsers have moved to eliminate cookies to protect users’ privacy.
This leaves publishers in a lurch. Consumers increasingly expect personalized content and experiences, across every experience — from TV to shopping to news and entertainment. And, without it, they’ll take their business elsewhere. Obviously, this is something no publisher can afford right now, especially as Google and Facebook gobble up a progressively larger share of the advertising pie. Publishers need all the well-targeted eyeballs they can possibly get onto their site to drive revenue.
Facing tremendous pressure from the death of cookies and a tight budget squeeze, publishers need a new solution — a way to connect with their audiences directly, to cut out the middleman and deliver the personalized content and experiences audiences expect.
Enter: email. Converting site visitors to logged-in subscribers through an email address opens a whole new world of opportunity in 1:1 engagement. From personalized content delivery over multiple channels to precise advertising that drives revenue, email is the answer to the death of cookies for digital publishers. Here’s why:
- Email enables behavior tracking and content targeting. By turning drive-by visitors into logged-in subscribers through email, publishers can begin to track user interests and behavior to better understand the type of content they want. Data shows consumers have no problem being tracked when it creates a more personalized experience, and they’re more likely to engage with content from publishers they know and trust. Publishers can use that opportunity to then curate content specifically for each user.
- Email is consistent and persistent. A person’s email address is ubiquitous across every device. Unlike cookies that cannot distinguish between multiple users sharing the same device, an email address is tied to a specific individual, allowing publishers to gather clear, unambiguous (albeit anonymous) data about that particular user. And, because audiences use the same email across browser, mobile, and various other devices, publishers can recognize the same user and track their engagement across multiple touchpoints.
- Email is direct. When publishers use email to curate and deliver personalized content, it’s the ultimate in 1:1 communication. It also gives publishers a tremendous amount of data about the user and their preferences, from the best days and times to send information about the content they clicked on. Plus, it eliminates reliance on social platforms, which control the content distribution and the audience data.
- Email opens the door to other channels. Once a user has subscribed to email, they’re also more likely to also subscribe to push notifications, direct messages and other channels when they know the content is curated and personalized. That means publishers can adapt their messaging strategy to include these new channels and reach subscribers over the channels they most prefer and engage with. For example, a publisher might find that a specific user engages more with business news sent via email but with entertainment news sent via push notification. With an email-based content curation and delivery program in place, publishers can deliver the right message to the right subscriber over the right channel — and do it all automatically.
Cultivating a direct relationship with known subscribers is vital for publishers to survive in the post-cookie era. In an ironic twist, as cookies die, email — the channel many called dead a decade ago — is the answer to publishers’ needs. Email is not dead, and in fact is breathing new life into the trusted relationships publishers need with their audiences.
As digital publishing adapts to a cookie-less world, the winners will be those who can leverage email-based tracking, targeting, and delivery into a 1:1, personalized, automated multichannel experience for their subscribers.
To learn more about how digital publishers can leverage email and multi-channel messaging to engage subscribers and drive more revenue, visit www.jeeng.com.
Jeff Kupietzky is CEO of Jeeng, formerly PowerInbox.
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact [email protected].
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