When companies realized data was a resource and not just the by-product of sales, they began to offer customers additional value: free products, savings, money back, even a club-like exclusivity. They often did it, and still do it, with customer loyalty programs, which were frequently expressed in the form of a physical card, such as Starbucks Rewards and MyPanera. But the very biggest companies have changed the loyalty game.

I have written many a post about the importance of keeping your data moving. As Mathew Wilder sang in “Break My Stride,” it’s “got to keep on moving” to enable you to act within the business moment. Real-time data analytic pipelines are the solid foundation to achieving the state of Active Intelligence, and you can only start that when you work on the freshest data available to you.

Bayer Crop Science uses Google Cloud to analyze billions of acres of land to better understand the characteristics of the soil that produces our food crops. Bayer’s teams of data scientists are leveraging services from across Google Cloud to load, store, analyze, and visualize geospatial data to develop unique business insights. And because much of this important work is done using publicly-available data, you can too!