Being data-driven helps businesses to cut costs and produce higher returns on investments, increasing their financial viability in the fight for a piece of the market pie. But *becoming* data-driven is a more labor-intensive process. In the same way that companies must align themselves around business objectives, data professionals must align their data around data models. In other words: if you want to run a successful data-driven operation, you need to model your data first.

Over the last 100 years alone, artificial intelligence has achieved what was once believed to be science fiction: cars that drive themselves, machine learning models that diagnose heart disease better than doctors can, and predictive customer analytics that lead to companies knowing their customers better than their parents do. This machine learning revolution was sparked by a simple question: can a computer learn without explicitly being told how?