This Week: AI’s Winners Will Be Those With The Best Data, Not The Best Algorithms, with Cory Janssen, Co-CEO at AltaML and Former Co-Founder of Investopedia

In one of our episodes of Pioneers, Cory Janssen, Co-CEO at AltaML, argues that in the commoditized AI landscape, access to unique industry data will determine the winners, not algorithms.

Cory reveals the answers to:

• Is data the new secret weapon in AI?

• Why algorithms alone may no longer cut it

• The untapped power of industry-specific insights

Read more to find out what types of data sets hold the key to success.

How To Get the Best Data for Your AI

How do you get the best possible training data for your AI?

Start by meeting some basic data requirements; then go the extra mile.

Basic Data Requirements

Firstly, your training data should be:

• 👍 Accurate and relevant — It should correctly represent the real-world scenarios the AI will encounter later.

• 👍 Clean and well-structured — It shouldn’t contain errors, duplicates, and irrelevant information. It should also be structured in an easy-to-process format.

• 👍 Comprehensive and complete — Finally, your data should cover all possible inputs and situations the AI may face.

However, as Cory mentions in our interview, AI winners will be those with the best data—not “good enough” data.

Meeting just basic criteria won’t be enough.

Going the Extra Mile

Here’s how we approach this challenge, and how you can, too:

• Use in-house data.

Training AI on your private internal data has three key benefits.

(1) It gives you a dramatic competitive advantage, (2) instantly aligns the AI with its intended use case, and (3) results in much more accurate outputs.

So, use it whenever you can.

However, if you need additional data, do this:

• Work with credible dataset partners.

Third-party training data should always come from reliable sources.

For example, in a recent AI project, we used CORE’s database of open-access research papers—which worked infinitely better than generic datasets or web-scraped content.

Trustworthy data leads to incomparably better performance. Always choose it over random, non-verified equivalents.

• Regularly retrain the AI on new data.

Things change. Internal processes and regulations evolve over time. Market conditions shift.

To keep your AI’s performance optimal, make sure to regularly update the data and retrain your AI when needed.

How AI Partnerships Work (& What to Look for in Partners)

Some AI partners (us included) will help you select and prepare your training data. Find out what else to expect from AI partnerships in this post.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes