Alternative Data Weekly #271
Theme: Finding a simple path from "too much data" to "good business decision".
Happy New Year! 2026 is going to be a great year.
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QUOTE
“The ability to determine what data is relevant for a question or task is a genuine skill, hard-won by many data professionals through years of wading through messy data and working with stakeholders to refine a vague question into something quantifiable.” - Katie Bauer, Wrong But Useful
News
Pods
Charts
Final Thoughts (My New Role at SymetryML)
#1 – Katie Bauer published The Next Data Bottleneck. December 2025.
My Take: In theory, with the right AI tools, everyone has access to all the information anyone could ever need. OK, now what do we do with that power? What question do we ask? It goes back to an article I wrote a while back: The Question is Your Moat.
It turns out, “it’s a hard needle to thread—knowing what’s actually useful for your stakeholder requires a real understanding of the problems they’re grappling with”.
This is why I believe AI will ultimately generate a significant amount of work for humans. The ability to recognize “those situations where data can be genuinely clarifying and knowing how to get it into the right state to make it a problem-solving tool”. People who have high agency, are thoughtful, observant, and solutions-oriented will thrive.
#2 – David Brunner published Cognitive Assembly Lines. December 2025.
My Take: My former colleague David Brunner addresses a key point when it comes to industrializing AI. To effectively deploy smart agents, you need a specific job description (i.e., context engineering). This aligns with a theme seen in recent weeks, the importance of deeply understanding your workflow, also stated as “the operating system surrounding the model: context, tools, workflow integration, and governance”.
The author analogizes “enterprise as code” to Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, written over 100 years ago. I love a good historical analogy.
#3 – Andreas Horn published #28 Edition: What to expect from AI in 2026? December 2025.
My Take: Of the 8 predictions the author shares for 2026, I most liked #8 - Human-in-the-Loop Automation Becomes the Default.
Systems will amplify our expertise (see podcast below). Human judgment will be amplified by machine efficiency. Domain expertise and asking the right question become the key. (See Katie Bauer's article above).
BONUS: Dan Evans from Strom King Analytics published Knowledge Isn’t the Bottleneck. Decisions Are. December 2025. “If information is better captured, organized, and shared, better decisions will follow.“
What else I am reading:
Lou Laporace published Moving from Systems of Record to Systems of Action with AI. December 2025.
Soren Larson published Cybernetic Arbitrage. December 2025.
Ryan Boyd published Stop Paying the Complexity Tax. December 2025.
Daria Cupreanu published I Built a Gigantic AI-Made Christmas Tree (Full of People Worth Reading). December 2025.
Phil Koopman published 2025 Year-End Reading, Viewing & Listening. December 2025.
Auren Hoffman published top 5 reading links for 2025. December 2025.
Illai Gescheit published It could blow up in your face!. December 2025.
Benn Stancil published Pure Heroin. December 2025.
Karie Burt published Increased Use of AI In Business Makes Data Governance an Urgent Priority. November 2025.
Source: The Data Cloud podcast published AI and Real-World Data: A New Era for Identifying and Curing Rare Diseases with Chandi Kodthiwada, Vice President of Product Management at Komodo Health. December 2025.
My Take: Komodo Health utilizes vast and disparate data sources to generate unprecedented insights in life sciences and healthcare. This is certainly an example of #dataforgood.
Chandi Kodthiwada notes that data are (is?) abundant, yet a scarcity of insight, as demonstrated by the fact that it can take 10 years to go from idea to having a drug available in the market. This time frame needs to be shortened. Komodo Health takes on this mission of reducing the burden of disease.
Of course, any time you are grappling with healthcare data, you have the additional concern of privacy (legal, moral, and ethical implications).
The problem of low-quality data among the 330 million de-identified patients on which Komodo has data. The idea is that if you understand the patient journey, you can build better drugs more quickly. Rather than sheer quantity, “richness” of data is the key. The amount of patient data exploded in 2010. Cleaning & linking the data (making the data more “rich”) is now the hard part.
The scale of the operation, simply dealing with the sheer amount of data, can overtake the original mission.
AI amplifies human expertise. But it lacks in explainability, which is key in healthcare (AI is not always explainable, repeatable).
Allow humans to ask better questions of the data. “The question is your moat.” (I’ve now referenced this old article of mine 3x).
Highlights (30-minute run time):
Minute 01:00 – intro to Chandi Kodthiwada & Komodo health
Minute 03:20 – intro to Chandi’s role
Minute 06:00 – creation of de-identified dataset; privacy responsibility
Minute 11:00 – how to create the dataset
Minute 12:00 – end-to-end journey of the data.
Minute 15:00 – looking at trillions of rows of data. (see Decentra Health)
Minute 16:30 – examples of data problems they deal with.
Minute 19:00 – the time it takes to answer complex questions using complex data. It takes a lot of time to find insights.
Minute 21:00 – turning months of work into minutes of work.
Minute 24:00 – healthcare industry’s (slow) adoption of AI and data technologies.
Minute 27:00 – being an AI-first organization.
Minute 28:00 – what’s next?
BONUS: Check out this new podcast from Solomon Kahn, Great Data Work.
BONUS 2: Revelio Labs Founder & CEO Ben Zweig speaks to Asymmetrix - Asymmetrix Newsletter #95. December 2025.
Source: Peter Baumann published 2025 - Talking about Data, Analytics and AI. December 2025.
“I tried to pick the one slide from each presentation which matters most for me. Let’s see what mattered in 2025.”
BONUS: Benedict Evans AI Eats The World. November 2025.
I am starting a new role as Chief Commercial Officer with SymetryML (updated LinkedIn profile).
I’ll be talking about this more in the coming weeks. Needless to say, I am excited to work with the team & move this forward.
Thank you to this network of people.
SymetryML is taking proven technology from the world of adtech and applying it to new verticals (notably observability, but also finance, healthcare, energy, etc.).
This technology helps organizations working with massive amounts of real-time data move from reactive monitoring to predictive intelligence. Securely. At scale.
If your business runs high-volume, real-time data, and today’s analytics can’t keep up, SymetryML helps you observe, predict, and act before issues hit.
From my LinkedIn:
“SymetryML is transforming how organizations understand, validate, and operationalize complex data at scale. Our platform enables the immediate application of predictive analytics and machine learning, improving transparency and decision-making across high-volume, high-complexity data environments.
As Chief Commercial Officer, I lead commercial strategy, go-to-market execution, and customer engagement. I work closely with clients, partners, and stakeholders to ensure our technology is deployed where it delivers the greatest impact.
My focus includes:
- Sales leadership and pipeline development, translating advanced technical capabilities into clear business value.
- Strategic partnerships that expand reach and strengthen platform adoption.
- Customer engagement from initial proof-of-concept through production deployment and long-term value realization.
- Pricing and commercial positioning for observability and real-time analytics solutions.
SymetryML is trusted by organizations seeking defensible, scalable approaches to observability, data integrity, and predictive decision-making, particularly where accuracy, transparency, and performance matter most.”
Happy t oconnect any time to talk about SymetryML.
I’ll be at BattleFin Miami. Let me know if you’ll be around.
Let’s go!
Congrats on your new role! Sounds interesting!