AI giants strike deals to collect real-world data

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

Amid an intense battle for supremacy, artificial-intelligence companies are forging alliances across industries and regions to help gather real-world data that can’t be scraped from the internet.

Over the past two months, OpenAI has tied up with e-commerce majors Shopeei and Shopify, while Google and Perplexity have doled out free access to their advanced AI tools to some users in India. Experts believe these moves will help the companies access structured consumer queries, product behaviors, and transactional data – training signals that are often unavailable via public data alone.

“These partnerships will provide them with diverse data sets that will help them to train their AI models better and generate more accurate outputs,” Sameer Patil, director of the Centre for Security, Strategy & Technology at global think tank Observer Research Foundation, told Rest of World. “It will also help them to innovate new ways to apply AI models in some particular sectors. This particularly applies to sectors where there is emphasis on hyper-customisation and hyper-personalised offerings like fintech and health care.”