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As a sales leader or salesperson, your success in closing deals depends on your ability to influence outcomes by guiding potential buyers from their current mindset to one where they believe your solution addresses their problem. Having extensive data about the company you are prospecting, their customers, partners, competitors, and broader market context enhances your knowledge and ability to connect with your audience.

We’ve discussed how the term artificial intelligence (AI) covers a wide array of applications; just like many of these functionalities, affective computing is beginning to see some growth in the market. Spanning across computer science, behavioral psychology, and cognitive science, affective computing uses hardware and software to identify human feelings, behaviors, and cognitive states through the detection and analysis of facial, body language, biometric, verbal and/or vocal signals.

“Architecture is not about installing infrastructure, but designing ways that information is stored and moved,” says Joe Spagnoletti, CIO of US LBM, a $3 billion specialty distributor of lumber, roofing, siding, and other building materials across 30 states. “When it comes to technology, we want to stay ahead of our competition, but not our technology partners,” he says.

There is an often-quoted economic theory that describes the balance that occurs when competitors in a market of a fixed size win or lose share depending on the success or failure of the other. The “zero sum game” (as it is known) has been cited so often since the financial crisis of the late 2000’s slowed global growth, that its continued use is becoming something of a cliché.

Data governance has taken on a new urgency in the digital economy for two reasons: 1) Increasingly, business decisions are influenced or made outright by automated systems driven by analytics, algorithms, and artificial intelligence that require trustworthy, high-quality data for good results; 2) Regulatory scrutiny of data integrity and access controls is now more frequently required to meet security, privacy, and ethics requirements.