In 2021 I published an important piece on O'Reilly Radar called "Rebranding Data."

The gist is that the data field keeps renaming itself, thereby resetting the hype curve, thereby avoiding a nasty (but much-deserved) market correction.

Four years later, to the day, the article still holds. And as we see more reports that genAI isn't delivering on its promises, it raises questions about what will happen next.

Does this mean the end of the data field? Maybe, maybe not.

But if it's anything like the last seventeen years, the field will most likely find some shiny new name by which to address itself. Buyers and investors will play along, treating it as something completely new. And the cycle will begin again.

The questions I pose in the article, and which I still have today, are:

How many more name-changes do we get? How long before regulation and consumer privacy frustrations start to chip away at the façade? How much longer will companies be able to paper over their AI-based systems’ mishaps?

Time will tell.