▶
Space Helmets for Stubborn Data Goats
16 minutes. The goat metaphor, the GBP 330 million NHS contract, and what happens when you finally unclip them.
The Five Percent
The 5% will connect their data, empower their staff, and own their intelligence.
The 5% are not smarter. They are not better funded. They simply noticed, at some point, that the world is made of relationships, and built their systems to remember that.
Instead of farming out intelligence - grow your own.
The era of the GBP 330 million band-aid is over.
For decades, the Great SQL Monoculture has kept our enterprise data tied up like obstinate goats in a paddock, facing different directions and resolutely refusing to mingle. And for decades, the insurance industry and the NHS have paid a staggering premium to external consultants just to tell us what those isolated goats are thinking.
But the 5% of companies that are actually succeeding with AI - the Lemonades, the Roots, the forward-thinking institutions - have cracked the code. They are not buying better algorithms or more expensive black boxes. They are building better environments. They are tearing down the fences, unclipping the carabiners, and letting their data connect in rich, semantic graphs.
Most importantly, they are handing the keys back to their own people.
Artificial intelligence is not a software subscription you can rent from an external vendor; it is a structural capability you must cultivate from within. When you teach your underwriters, your clinicians, and your claims handlers the true shape of the data, the magic returns in-house.
You no longer need to outsource your corporate memory. The AI becomes explainable, and treating people like people becomes a natural byproduct of your architecture. Consumer Duty - being fair. Customer Care - making people feel listened to. Duty of Care - the whole-person responsibility the NHS carries every day. These are not compliance checkboxes; they are what connected data does automatically when the relationships are intact. And the multi-million-pound consulting dependency simply evaporates.
The 95% will keep writing blank cheques to external vendors and wondering why their pilots continuously fail to reach production.
The 5% will connect their data, empower their staff, and own their intelligence.
The other 95% are still extracting it into rows, one cell at a time, and wondering why the model cannot tell them anything they did not already know.
Learn and believe in your abilities. In Insurance and the NHS, the answer is not Palantir. The answer is you.
Follow the Five Percent.
