Many business executives and investors believe that using customer data capabilities can give businesses an unbeatable competitive edge. With more customers, you can collect more data, and when you use machine learning tools to analyze that data, you can improve your product and draw in more customers. Then, you can gather even more data and eventually marginalize your rivals in a manner similar to how companies with significant network effects do so. At least, that is the theory. The majority of the time, this assumption is incorrect. Most of the time, people vastly underestimate the benefit that data offers.We humans routinely prevailed in the early chess matches between humans and computers. By modern standards, those chess-playing programs were primitive. As chess game programmers improved, grandmasters, including the world champion, eventually fell to computers.

Then something amusing transpired. A pair of amateur competitors entered a 2005 online competition with few rules in place. The competitors included computers. also grandmasters However, the amateur team had an advantage over its rivals' human and digital brains thanks to specialized software they developed to help them play against computers and a methodology that helped them decide when to favor their brainpower over their computer's advice. The amateur team won the competition. While the most advanced chess-playing computers of today are almost impossible to defeat by human players alone, humans and computers working together not only have a chance but also have the ability to win.

Your company will be able to understand its competition when it competes for business by utilizing big data. Customer industry market data may indicate shifting focus from one industry segment to another. Data can also assist you in taking into account the general business environment.

In a typical chess game, there are billions of possible moves. Poor decisions in the business world have real-world repercussions. But the decisions you make in business are much more likely to be successful when you combine the most complete, up-to-date data with the best minds available.

Question: After reading the opinion above, how can businesses fail despite having the most complete, up-to-date data with the best minds available?