Alternative Data Weekly #245
Theme: Clean Your House Before Inviting the Robots In
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QUOTES:
“…the best solution will always require harmony between data perspectives and business perspectives.” - Gaby Marano
News
Pods
Charts
Final Thoughts (Happy 4th of July)
#1– VettaFi published Gaby Marano on data, AI & setting up your organization for success. June 2025.
My Take: A common theme is trust (see last week’s ADW as well). It takes time to build trust, and it can be lost in a minute. Getting together with both the data teams and the business teams (marrying tech & domain expertise) ensures you are building data products and experiences that solve real-world problems.
See Gaby’s related article from March 2025 (Transforming data into sales)
#2 – Brad Schneider of Nomad published Why Document Processing Costs Are About To Collapse. June 2025.
My Take: I came across this article as I was sitting in my doctor’s office waiting room. I had just finished using a pen, paper, and clipboard to fill out some insurance information (seriously… this still happens).
AI is changing how data/information is distributed and consumed. But it will also change how data is collected. Automating collection is a big unlock.
“The future belongs to systems that understand documents as humans do, at costs that make universal document intelligence possible.”
Sidenote: passively collecting data (see OpenAI’s device) will dramatically increase the amount of information collected and can be a huge benefit to people, IF we can get beyond the creepiness of having everything we do automatically recorded for our potential future benefit.
#3 – 67 Bricks published What makes a great data product?. June 2025.
My Take: The idea is that you need to provide answers, not data. This resonated with me. People just want the answer. If you can do this consistently & deliver value, you will be in a good spot.
BONUS: Jordan Hauer’s 227 Sources of Alternative Data Content. June 2025. “Shown below are the 227 feeds I've decided have a high signal-noise ratio and thus I've deemed a high priority for us to closely monitor. Collectively, these content sources post 2,800+ stories per month. This amounts to about 10% of the total universe of RSS feeds and only about 2% of the total number of stories we're monitoring overall. But in our regular Amassed Insights series, you'll notice that the majority of the articles included come from this subset of higher priority feeds.”
What else I am reading:
Envestnet sells Yodlee. June 2025. (Julian Brault’s version: Envestnet Dumps Open Banking Pioneer Yodlee to STG for Fraction of Rival Plaid's Billion Dollar Valuation)
Check out Neudata’s survey: 2025 'Future of the data industry'.
Kevin Petrie published Time to modernize. June 2025.
My Data Outlet published How quickly should you be able to get your backtest results? June 2025.
Dan Evans of Storm King Analytics published Kill Your Data Silos, Not Your Data Team. June 2025.
The World of DaaS published World of DaaS Roundtable Recap: The New GTM Stack in DaaS. June 2025.
Jared Blank’s How to use AI in your PR strategy. June 2025. (get smarter about marketing: here).
Peter Addo, Adam Zable, Andrew Zahuranec, Stefan Verhulst published Reimagining Data Governance for AI. April 2025.
Shaili Guru published Generative AI Explained: The Technology Behind ChatGPT and Content Creation. June 2025. (related Lenny’s An AI glossary).
Kyle Jahner published Musk’s X Settles Data-Scraping Dispute Against Israeli Data Firm. June 2025.
Source: The Cube published Gerard Francis, JP Morgan Chase & Carl Perry, Snowflake | Snowflake Summit 2025
My Take: Great to hear from the front lines. How are big companies like JPM thinking about (and executing on) data & AI projects?
Consumers started using AI & find tremendous value … this will bleed into professional workflows. They discuss the importance of trust when taking this to professional workflows (minute 5:00).
JPM’s goal is to have an integrated data platform where all the data is visible, accessible, & discoverable with the right governance. This is the basis for AI products.
Bringing it all together is the key.
Highlights (20-minute run time)
Minute 00:45 – intro to JPM and how they think about data & AI
Minute 02:15 – what is fusion?
Minute 04:00 – Using JPM internal data is powerful.
Minute 04:30 – expectation that people will be able to question all of their data at any time.
Minute 06:15 – combining disparate datasets; semantic models (how?).
Minute 17:00 – make sure you have the right data; text-to-SQL (things into strings).
Source: Dylan Anderson published Issue #46 – Dealing with the Difficulties of Data Ownership
Only with all three working in harmony can you achieve sustainable data quality.
Why is Data Governance so important, especially when it comes to solving these constant ownership issues in data?
Strategy to Use Data.
Clarifies Data Ownership Roles.
Bridging the Business Context.
Enabled by Data Quality Tools.
Happy 4th of July!
