Data is eating the world and there are many indicators of its ubiquitous presence in our lives. From fueling the recent success of “artificial intelligence” (AI) and the rise of “digital transformation” to its accelerated growth due to Covid-19 to new approaches to its “monetization” (finding money in mining data, a growing practice since at least the 1970s) to how it makes businesses and consumers both anxious and animated, data dominates our deeds, debates, and dreams. Here’s the data on the state-of-data at the end of 2020. Data deluge gettyThe Covid effect…2,165 billion the number of total streaming minutes from February 24 to June 7, 2020, up from 1,165 billion in the same period in 2019 [Recode]37.1 the percentage increase in third quarter 2020 e-commerce from the third quarter of 2019 (while total retail sales increased 6.9% in the same period) [U.S. Census Bureau]51 the percentage of CIOs and CTOs that report accelerating the adoption of machine learning and AI due to covid-19 [IEEE]32 the percentage of business executives at companies that adopted AI in sales and marketing that reported the failure of their machine learning models in that function that relied on data collected before the pandemic and did not reflect changing consumer behavior [McKinsey]MORE FOR YOU How AI Helps Advance Immunotherapy And Precision Medicine“Buying one-way airline tickets was a good predictor of fraud [in automated detection models]. Postal Service every year, providing “a rich source of data on everything from processing speeds, to shipping rates and delivery routes”; the company’s Q3 2020 revenues from managing deliveries of online sales were up nearly 50% from the year-earlier period [WSJ]3x the factor by which the number of physical records in the National Archives has increased since 1991; the number of electronic records has increased by a factor of 1,654 [National Archives]2.5 billion the number of years it would take a supercomputer to perform the Gaussian boson sampling calculation but took only 200 seconds on a quantum computer at the University of Science and Technology of China [Science]

Source: Forbes December 27, 2020 13:52 UTC