Ambient Experiences, Turnip Farms and Data INC.
A Day of Data, AI and Enterprise Innovation At Constellation's Ambient Experience Summit
This week, I am prepping for a flurry of SXSW-related activities, which is always a blur of frenetic activity. Still, before I dive headfirst into that, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the most recent industry event in which I participated. The Ambient Experience Summit is an event series produced by my friends at Constellation Research and aims to bring the worlds of CX (Customer Experience) and EX (Employee Experience) together. I was reminded of a few things during this event—the first is that experience matters—and our experiences in the real world still trump the amazingly cool innovations that we’re seeing progress in the virtual/digital world.
My friend Ray Wang introduced me to the Constellation Research world he began building over a decade ago, and I was a keynote at one of the very first events. Ray walked into the first cocktail hour sporting an Apple Vision Pro—and while it was a great conversation piece, the people there were more interested in meeting and getting to know each other, which I found refreshing and how it should be. A recent fun fact related to Ray and me is that the Ambient Experience Summit was held last week in Austin, almost exactly a year later than last Year’s SXSW. In Austin a year ago, Ray invited me to dinner and shared his latest thoughts and ideas on penning a book about data's role in the business world, the customer experience, and AI. He challenged me to think of his idea's memorable shorthand/name. My response came almost immediately after listening to him describe his vision:
Data INC.
So, a year later, in Austin, Ray got to preview his vision of what a Data INC business is and isn’t. In his own words:
“Data is water, not oil.”
And we know how essential water is to sustain life. This is the point and distinction I believe Ray was making—that, like water, data is going to be so integral and core to the modern business model—that the companies who own it know what to do with it and can act upon it intelligently, will be the companies who emerge from the industrial data revolution as leaders. These companies will be Data INC. companies. On that note—despite Google’s recent challenges with Gemini—they are still potentially best positioned in the AI arms race due to the quality and quantity of the data they own. Google has challenges—but it’s a Data Inc. company built from the ground up.
Halfway through the day, Liz Miller, the event’s MC, asked me to develop a business model on the spot. Being the wise@ss I am, I blurted out, “Turnip Farm.” Little did I realize I had committed myself and half the room to create an ambient experience revolving around the Turnip Farm business model. When all was said and done—” team Turnip " was a really fun experience. We came up with various ideas ranging from a Turnip-only gourmet restaurant to a Turnip-based brewery. We even dedicated a day to celebrate Turnips worldwide called “World Turnip Day,” complete with the hashtag #Turnip4what.
At the end of the night, a few of us “digital OGs” got together for a photo: (Dion Hinchcliffe, myself, Ray Wang, and Constellation Research VP David Stanley). David and I sat together during dinner, recounting the heady early days as social media spread like wildfire across business and culture. We reflected on how similar these AI times feel to those early days that eventually gave us Instagram, Twitter, Snap, Facebook, YouTube, and, more recently, TikTok; it will be something else to see where AI nets out ten-plus years from now. I hope I can pose for another picture—it may be taken by an AGI-enabled robot, this time from a new Data Inc. company we haven’t heard of yet.