Lot's of companies have _vast_ amounts of unique data, often reaching back many, many decades. For example, one company I worked with manufactured, installed,

Lot's of companies have _vast_ amounts of unique data, often reaching back many, many decades. For example, one company I worked with manufactured, installed, and did maintenance certain electrical / power and machine/mechanical products. They had archives full, dating back many decades, of error reports and such. Luckily for them, the equipment problems 50 years ago were no different from problems today, so the data was still highly relevant. The company went on to digitize all this data, structure it in a usable way, and then build (i.e hire in ML consultants) models on that data - which they used for predictive work - in this case, anomaly detection, early warning systems, etc. The net results were happier customers, less faults, less warranty expenses, etc. which in turn made them more competitive. This is just one example, but there are many others. Lots of data that the big tech giants do not have access to, but which is (or can be) of great value.