In the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about AI and automation. But I believe that the next hurdle that SMEs will actually hit is not AI but "data ".
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So far, I have started a number of businesses from scratch and grown them to multi-million dollar scale, I've started a number of businesses from scratch and grown them to multi-million-dollar scale. Both e-commerce businesses and SaaS start-ups. However, there is a common issue that appears in every phase.
That is the limitation of spreadsheets.
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As the business grows and annual sales exceed millions of dollars, Sales, inventory, advertising, customer data, payment data ...... All the numbers start to pile up discretely.
At first, you can get by with a Google spreadsheet. But when the scale gets a bit bigger, it becomes noise that can no longer be tracked by the human eye and hand.
Moreover, in the case of Japanese companies, Excel management is the norm, even in large companies. The person in charge manually puts the figures together every day, The only way to maintain consistency is for the person in charge to manually add up the figures every day.
This is more painful work than it looks. They are saying 'let's increase productivity' while copying numbers by hand. It's a contradiction.
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That is why what is needed now is the introduction of data engineering. Especially key is Data Build Tool (DBT).
DBTs are the engineers in charge of cleansing data, so to speak. Suck up scattered data, transform it into a clean form and feed it to AI and BI tools.
AI only works correctly when given the right data. That is why you need to set up your data pipeline before AI.
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For example, they want to optimise sales measures. The finance team wants to see cash flow in real time. Want to use AI for forecasting.
But all of them are based on the assumption that the right data exists first. Even in an age when AI seems like magic, In fact, the most human and down-to-earth part of the process - "cleaning up the data " - is the foundation of everything. *"Cleaning up the data " is the foundation of everything.
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In the future, SMEs will hire people, face when trying to scale their business, neither funding nor recruitment, but data structuring.
AI is harder to 'feed' than to 'use'. Graduate from spreadsheets, tools like DBT to create data that humans can understand. That is the first step for SMEs to survive the AI era.