Your Data Lake needs to evolve into a Data Ocean

Do you know the difference between a Data Lake, a Data Ocean, and a Data Atmosphere? 

This article is going to coin two new phrases. The Data Ocean and the Data Atmosphere. 

Throughout my career, I have coined phrases, which I love to do, only to see them come back years later. “Marketecture” is one of them. I used this term in a presentation for Merrill Lynch in 1999 or 2000 and was asked not to use it by the then-leadership of JWT. Now, it’s part of the vernacular. I also acquired the domain mktg.ai a decade ago. Pretty prescient. 

The industry often talks about Data Lakes. This is a long-standing phrase in the technology space that refers to a vast amount of data in a contained space. Most companies have licensed software to manage and maintain their data lakes. Yet I would surmise that this turn of phrase is only relevant to corporations and organizations that have a finite amount of data. The lake may grow each year, but the depth, breadth, and velocity of that growth are not transformational. 

The Data Ocean is a different case.  

We've seen Apple struggle specifically with rolling out a comprehensive vision of AI. Many pundits are skewering Apple for its inability to crack the proverbial AI code. Yet what these pundits are missing is the fact that Apple does not have comparable data to Google, Meta, or OpenAI. The company prides itself on privacy, whereas the others exploit private data to no end. 

So, what is a Data Ocean? It is a breadth and depth of data growing at such incredible velocity and has such immense scale that it's difficult to ring fence in any given way.

OpenAI realized this sometime ago. They realized that the Internet was essentially a Data Ocean. It was never-ending and all-encompassing, and if they could use computing power to synthesize and capture this data to train an AI, they could unleash true artificial intelligence, which is what they've done. 

The only way to unleash incredibly deep artificial intelligence is to have a never-ending data supply. Like I said, only a handful of companies have this, and here they are: Google is number one.  Meta is a close number two. Amazon is number three. X is number four. Then, there are players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity who figured out that they could scrape the open internet, just like Google had “Web Crawlers” years ago. Apple does not have the same depth and breadth of data because Apple is a hardware company, maybe a data gateway, but not a Data Ocean. So, having an Apple-first-Gen AI is far-reaching. 

So now what is a Data Atmosphere? 

The closest way to explain it is to imagine the air you breathe IS data. I used to say decades ago, “Everything will be digital. Including the print newspaper you hold in your hands. It may tacitly feel like it’s paper, but it will be digital. How do I know? Here’s how I know: 

In 1998, I met at MIT, and Joseph Jacobsen, a professor, presented a technology called “E Ink.” He had a piece of acetate in his hand, and he held it up and showed that it was a flimsy piece of plastic painted with some pink substance. He then held the acetate on his edge against a device, and text loaded across the page. An audible gasp filled the room. He rubbed his hand over the text and showed that it could not be erased until he held it back against the device, and the text completely changed. Mind blown! This became the foundation of the eReader, the Kindle. 

Well, Elon Musk (once again) has built the Data Atmosphere. It’s currently called Starlink and there is no real competition. Today, he has 8,000 satellites in orbit with a plan to scale to 42,000. And if you use Starlink, guess what? Your data is flowing through Elon Musk’s Data Atmosphere. Every molecule of data! 

My point is that the AI LLM die has been cast, and there are three tiers of winners: Tier 1 is Google, Meta, xAI, and OpenAI. Tier II is Amazon, Anthropic, and Perplexity, and there will be others. Walmart should be at the top of the chain. Tier III is all the rest of the LLM(ish) solutions. 

So while all eyes have been focused on Gen AI, the next wave will be transformation and Applied AI. Companies like mktg.ai will truly revolutionize marketing by leveraging these LLMs to create tools for marketers to drive efficiency and effectiveness.