Demystify Your Data: Monetization Strategies for an AI-Driven World

Is your organization operating as an “information business,” treating data as a strategic asset? Does your organization liquify data assets, cultivate a data democracy that enthusiastically engages with data assets, and connect data monetization with financial performance?

As leaders aspire to leverage new technological advancements such as AI, it’s important to ensure that the organization can successfully move through the entire data-value creation process. According to Barbara Wixom, Ph.D., Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) and one of the world’s leading data thought leaders, becoming great at AI requires a deep understanding of data monetization so AI investments contribute to the right value creating initiatives, with the right capabilities – and generate desired outcomes.

Wixom has spent three decades in academia helping organizations better understand and create value from their data while debunking myths and illuminating core concepts that matter. Her accessible workshops and easily applied frameworks and management tools simplify the often complicated conversations about data and AI to help leaders learn how to maximize their data and AI investment returns.

Through her expert guidance and vast experiences with organizations of all types, Wixom can help organizations in any sector think like an information business and formulate a distinct data monetization strategy and approach that works for them.

Don’t Fall Behind in Data Monetization

In her eagerly anticipated new book, “Data is Everybody’s Business: The Fundamentals of Data Monetization” (MIT Press, September 26, 2023), Wixom explains that data monetization must be a core business activity for all organizations, regardless of whether the organization is big or small, commercial or non-commercial. The book describes data monetization using language that anyone from board members and executive teams to front-line workers can understand.

Wixom’s simple terms, clear definitions and easy-to-use frameworks make data monetization consumable and free up people enterprise-wide to have productive conversations about how to monetize data.

Also included are Wixom’s “flywheel” frameworks – which she refers to as “the ABCs of data monetization” – that communicate what it takes to be successful with data monetization, data liquidity and data democracy.

“The flywheel consists of three frameworks that allow organizations to maximize value creation and realization with their data,” explains Wixom, winner of the 2021 Association for Information Systems AIS Outreach Practice Publication Award for her data monetization research. “These frameworks show how to monetize what you need to monetize, who’s involved, and what the overall organizational implications are.”

Succeeding in AI: Scaling up, Scaling out, and Sustaining at Scale

With the increasing focus on artificial intelligence, Wixom urges leaders to think of how to learn about, grow into, and establish foundations for AI that will allow them to incorporate it into business-as-usual activities. With a focus on demystifying what it takes to scale AI systems, she educates leaders on the nuance of scaling up – moving AI into deployment; scaling out – taking an AI model and using it in different contexts and geographies; and sustaining at scale – managing volumes of interrelated AI models over time.

“In the past, scaling up was about getting as many user adoptions as possible, but that thinking doesn’t work with AI,” explains Wixom, who has been tracking fifty AI projects over time to investigate how such projects grow and change. “With AI, at the end of the day, you don’t want more users. In many effective AI deployments, you’re actually reducing adoption.” 

As AI transforms industries, leaders must understand the art of data monetization to craft successful strategies that will stand the test of time. Stern Strategy Group connects you with renowned thought leaders whose insights, strategies and management frameworks help organizations fuel growth and disruptive innovation to better compete in a constantly changing world. Let us arrange for these esteemed experts to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting sessions, workshops and keynotes.