Predictive Analytics, Revised and Updated

AfterwordEleven Predictions for the First Hour of 2022

What's next is what's next.…Predictive analytics is where business intelligence is going.

—Rick Whiting, InformationWeek

Good morning. It's January 3, 2022, the first workday of the year. As you drive to the office, the only thing predictive analytics (PA) doesn't do for you is steer the car (but that's coming soon as well).

1. Antitheft. As you enter your car, a predictive model establishes your identity based on several biometric readings, rendering it virtually impossible for an imposter to start the engine.
2. Entertainment. Spotify plays new music it predicts you will like.
3. Traffic. Your navigator pipes up and suggests alternative routing due to predicted traffic delays. Because the new route has hills and your car's battery—its only energy source—is low, your maximum acceleration is decreased.
4. Breakfast. An en route drive-through restaurant is suggested by a recommendation system that knows its daily food preference predictions must be accurate or you will disable it.
5. Social. Your Social Techretary offers to read you select Facebook feeds and Match.com responses it predicts will be of greatest interest. Inappropriate comments are filtered out. CareerBuilder offers to read postings of jobs for which you're predicted to apply. When playing your voice mail, solicitations such as robocall messages are screened by a predictive model just like e-mail spam.
6. Deals. You accept your smartphone's offer to read to you a text message ...