How to Get Value From Data

Whether you’re interested in the AI- or data-as-a-business space, or just looking to gain deeper insights into the true value of data for your own use and business, this week’s podcast is absolutely required material.

We spoke to Priaash Ramadeen, co-founder and CEO of The Awareness Company, who is building African AI-powered data solutions that are more accessible and actionable than the normal “overloaded, under-used” stuff in the data space. Check it out…

Some of the juicy bits…

1. Data is power (if you use it right)

We all have a lot of data (much of it unused), with a lot of people jumping on the data bandwagon. But as Priaash affirms, data alone is not useful, it’s all about the application of it – how effectively you can draw actionable insights from data.

And that requires a lot of refining to turn it into stories, yet Priaash says most Data Centres spend up to 60% of their time on cleaning data, leaving precious little time for getting real insights.

2. Unlocking true value from data

As Priaash points out, when most people hear data they think of measurement or niche applications. So they instead built a business around being able to better extract valuable stories from data and then build in mechanisms that allow everyone at every level of the company to actually access data to benefit them in their individual roles.

3. Creating your own data

As the discussion flows to the quality of data in South Africa, Priaash makes the point that our data only feels chaotic because we tend to build it up bit by bit over time, and then try to retroactively make sense of what we’ve been able to gather so far.

The next paradigm is to be able to build the data your company really needs from scratch, which is why their service is built around coming and really building structured data with a purpose from the ground up. And yes, you can integrate data from current systems, but it has to absolutely make sense for you to get actual actionable insights with AI models.

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