AI vendors are relearning the oldest rule in the data business

Long before anyone trained a model on customer data, the marketing data business worked out the terms for pooling it. Catalog retailers in the 1990s joined data cooperatives that combined their transaction histories so each member could find new buyers, and the arrangements held together because the rules were blunt.

A retailer contributed data to receive modeled prospects; no member got a rival's customer file; and a company that stopped contributing stopped receiving. Card fraud consortia run on similar give-to-get terms. Nobody would call these systems elegant, but every participant understood the trade.

Software vendors building AI features are now running into the same question, usually without the rules. Traditional software sat on top of a customer's data and operated on it. AI products learn from data, and on a multi-tenant platform, that learning rarely stays within a single account.

One company's records can sharpen the enrichment, lead scoring, and...

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