The birth of Data Inc.?

Google's acquisition of Spirit Airlines data for $10 million highlights the value of proprietary data to train models, bolster customer profiles and be more predictive.

The big question is whether Google's purchase is merely opportunistic or the beginning of a more enterprise and industry specific data market.

Here's how the market for these proprietary data sets may play out.

• Enterprises won't sell their data because it's their competitive advantage--or so they think. The common thinking is that every enterprise will leverage its own data to train open models for agentic AI. Now data is the business moat, but it's highly likely that there will be enterprises that don't have the talent, skills or business acumen to leverage their own datasets. For now, companies are trying to follow the Data Inc. approach, which was outlined in 2023 by Constellation Research CEO R "Ray" Wang.
• Some subset of enterprises will license proprietary data to monetize it beyond the company's business. Licensing your internal data is no different than a media company with its own streaming service also licensing to Netflix to monetize. Like media, some of those deals are incredibly short sighted but pay the bills today.
• SaaS vendors that can anonymize data by industries could license data to model builders beyond what they are doing internally. Think industry focused software providers with datasets that can train models. Rootstock, Veeva and Guidewire would be examples.
• Industries could create data sharing arrangements to create focused models that then could be customized.
• And companies with insights into how work gets done could also set up data businesses. Celonis, ServiceNow, Workday and SAP come to mind.

These data markets are going to develop. The timing remains to be seen.

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