Big Data and AI. Too Much Data. Zero Strategy. - with Tom Howe, Hydrolix

Big data and AI are on a collision course. And most companies are not ready for what comes next.

In this episode of Real World AI Talks by Just AI News, host and editor-in-chief Paulo Iñaki Palma sits down with Tom Howe, Director of Insights Engineering at Hydrolix, a real time data analytics platform trusted by companies from growing e-commerce businesses all the way up to Fox, whose Super Bowl stream Hydrolix helped power in real time. The conversation covers one of the most underrated problems behind the AI boom: how companies are collecting petabytes of data, spending millions on AI tools, and have no clear strategy for what to do with any of it.

Most companies think more data means better AI. Tom Howe says that is one of the most expensive misconceptions in the industry right now. Without a clear AI data strategy, companies end up in a feedback loop where AI is analyzing AI, producing confident answers based on wrong or incomplete data, and nobody is catching it. Tom has seen entire data clusters crash because a poorly configured LLM wrote queries that took down the hardware entirely.

In this episode we cover:

• Why companies are collecting more data than they can actually use
• What happens when an LLM works with poorly structured or incomplete data
• Why AI giving you a confident answer is not the same as a correct one
• How to decide what data is useful and what is just expensive noise
• What AI bots are doing to web traffic and why blocking them all is the wrong move
• How generative engine optimization is replacing traditional SEO
• Why the dependency on advertising revenue is about to become a serious business problem
• What major changes to internet trust and security could look like in the next five years
• Why open source AI models are changing the data infrastructure conversation
• What real time data analytics actually looks like on Super Bowl day

AI is not just a productivity tool. It is generating more data than most companies know what to do with. Tom Howe has spent his career solving exactly that problem, and this is one of the most practical and honest conversations about big data and AI infrastructure we have published.

Real World AI Talks is hosted by Paulo Iñaki Palma, editor-in-chief of Just AI News, and is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. New episodes every week.