Data has become the most important business asset for companies today. Data helps businesses understand their customers and spot trends early.

1. HOW ANY BUSINESS MUST USE DATA
TO CREATE SMARTER SERVICES FOR
THEIR CUSTOMERS

2. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
HOW ANY BUSINESS MUST USE DATA TO CREATE
SMARTER SERVICES FOR THEIR CUSTOMERS
Data has become the fuel for business success. Here we look at how data
can help companies create better and smarter services for their customers.

3. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Data is everywhere, and we're increasingly generating more and more of it. The explosion in data
growth has kick-started a new industrial revolution, with businesses taking the information and
using it to build services that help us understand and navigate the world around us. From GPS
apps that tell us the nearest place we can buy a pizza to genomic programs sequencing DNA in
order to create new medicines and cure disease.
But it isn’t just international pharma and tech giants that have cashed in on the fuel source of the
information age. Companies of all shapes and sizes have worked out how to profit from it by
extracting the insight it contains and selling it back to us. By doing this, some of these companies,
such as Netflix, Uber, and AirBnB, have gone on to become industry giants and household names
themselves. The truth is, the data and tools are out there for anyone to use and have never been
more accessible, and I believe almost any business can benefit from putting them to work.

4. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
WHAT ARE SMART SERVICES?
Services are the products of the 21st century. In the 20th century, businesses like Ford (cars), IBM
(computers), and Microsoft (software) conquered the world by creating products that changed it. This
century, Meta, Google, and Amazon (as well as many others) do the same by selling services rather
than anything physical. Well, Amazon (and the others, in fact) does also sell products, but the majority
of its revenue comes from selling services that allow others to sell through them in exchange for a cut
of the proceeds.
What is it that makes them “smart” services, though? Well, the key is that, as well as selling data to us,
they used advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics to pull insights
from the data and provide it in a form that makes our lives richer, simpler, or more low-friction. Google
is a great way of finding information, but it doesn’t just search all of the internet and return whatever
most closely fits the text or speech that we’ve searched for. It uses AI to get a deeper understanding of
what we're looking for and to rank the possible results in the order that we're most likely to find them
useful. Likewise, Facebook doesn’t let us search and add our friends. It uses algorithms to suggest the
people we’re most likely to want to connect with, as well as to provide us with news and entertainment
content it thinks we’ll enjoy.

5. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Netflix and Spotify are two more really good examples. They both provide us with an instantly
accessible library of content, but beyond that, they use the data they learn about us, and their
millions of other users, to select the movies we're most likely to want to watch and the music we
like to listen to.
That’s the basics of what I call “smart services” – not just huge piles of data we can search through
to find what we want, but tools and applications that help us to make the most of them.
The smartest of smart services often find ways to go on to create entirely new revenue streams
with the data they’re generating. For example, Google and Facebook advertising services take
what they learn about us as we search and browse the internet, sell it (indirectly) to advertisers by
allowing them to put ads on the home screen of people who fit their customer profile.

6. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
In China, Didi Chuxing – a rival ride-sharing service to Uber – takes the information it gathers on
the journeys and movements of its half a billion registered customers and sells it to authorities
and transport businesses to help them plan roadworks and infrastructure work through its Smart
Transportation Brain service.
Meanwhile, US company Automated Insights harnesses the power of natural language processing
(NLP) – an AI technology that lets computers “understand” human language – to scan economic,
meteorological, and other data sources and compile automated reports and articles for sale to
media companies and businesses. And San Francisco-based fashion seller Stitch Fix uses AI to
predict which items of clothing perfectly match the shape and taste of its customers and sends
them out through a subscription service.

7. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
ANY COMPANY CAN CREATE SMART SERVICES
As you can see, smart services are already revolutionizing a great many markets and fields of industry.
In fact, it's hard to think of an area of business or consumer services that hasn't been disrupted by the
arrival of AI and big data on the scene.
Part of the reason they have become so ubiquitous is the tools and platforms that have emerged to
provide the necessary infrastructure – from data gathering to storage, processing, and operationalizing
– "as-a-service ."Whereas when Netflix started its streaming business over a decade ago, it began by
building vast quantities of networked storage servers to hold all of its content, along with the data it
generates, today everything sits in the cloud on Amazon’s AWS servers. This means companies putting
the infrastructure in place only pay for what they are using and lowers the barriers to entry enough that
almost anyone with a game-changing idea can put it to work and see what happens to their industry.
You can even hire actual robots as-a-service to build your own robotic warehouse or manufacturing
empire from companies like Invia Robotics, so you don’t have to be Amazon to take advantage of the
efficiencies of workplace automation.

8. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
All of this means that today, your ability to innovate is the key differentiator between
your business and the competition when it comes to capitalizing on data and new
technologies. In many cases, budgets and access to tech skills and infrastructure are no
longer the challenges. This means there is a more level playing field and more chance
that good ideas will make it into the world – which is good news for businesses and
consumers. We often hear it said, "every company is a tech company now," and that’s
because just about anyone has the opportunity to harness data and technology in order
to improve the way they do business.

9. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
For more on the topic of data, sign up for my newsletter and check out the new
edition of my book ‘Data Strategy: How To Profit From A World Of Big Data,
Analytics And Artificial Intelligence.

10. © 2021 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker,
futurist, and a strategic business & technology advisor to governments and
companies. He helps organisations improve their business performance, use data
more intelligently, and understand the implications of new technologies such as
artificial intelligence, big data, blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is
a frequent contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for
Forbes. Every day Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers
and shares content that reaches millions of readers.

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www.bernardmarr.com