Our pre-publication paper is out! The Next Phase of the Data Economy: Economic & Technological Perspectives co-authored with some amazing people: Scott Kominers, Leora Kornfeld, John Deighton, Apurva Chitnis, Kinjal Shah, Reid Williams, Doc Searls, Scott Belsky, Kasia Chmielinski, David Eliot, Carolina A. Rossini, JD, MA, LLM, MBA

Full paper here.

We’re on the precipice of an internet with more personalized, user-centric applications, one that’ll stimulate new forms of economic interaction and innovation within the data ecosystem. With that, the demand for all forms of data is continuing to accelerate: from public data for training foundational models, to private data for personalization purposes and AI agents. All of this against strong tailwinds toward individual data portability and agency, enabling individuals to leverage their data across surfaces, scaling the utility and value of their data as the number of possible data destinations increases.

To enable this, we will see the inversion of the internet’s personal data model – from data going to apps, toward apps, agents and services coming to us and our data. This’ll necessitate the re-aggregation of our data in personal data stores, and some system to intuitively provision access to our data to the various destinations we choose. The first challenge, however, is to incentivize users to re-aggregate as much of their data somewhere they have stewardship over -- a big part of our focus at koodos. Once that’s accomplished, there’ll be opportunities to create upstream and downstream value from a more user-centered liquid data ecosystem.

Personal data stores have the potential to increase our agency and independence with regard to data by allowing us to manage, share, and protect our data as we see fit. In our paper we discuss why personal data stores have faced significant challenges in gaining widespread adoption to date, and we cover some of the positive tailwinds in that direction, including new regulation, infrastructure developments, accelerating consumer adoption and fundamental market dynamics. We also cover how value will be created in a more individual-centric data economy.