It's about the data, baby!
Switzerland is currently at crossroads: Go forward and make that data available in or leave the market with hundreds(!) of data lakes (or puddles) of varying quality for the next couple of years. As if we had a lot of time to reduce our energy consumption. If you can vote in Switzerland, you have the choice to enable innovation by improving the way, consumption data is made available and can be used, a lot.
Background
Imagine you are running a country and want to use less and different energy. Going for the big consumers is obvious and easy because there's a single consumer who consumes a lot. But what about the many small ones like you and me, who could contribute a bit to saving energy if they only knew about their energy consumption, got nudged from time to time and if the action had an immediate impact? Sounds easy. If you had the data.
You might be surprised, how little data electricity providers actually have about their customers. In the old days, the electricity meter was measured once per year. That's good enough to create an invoice, but does not help at all if you want to influence consumer behaviour. Rolling out smart meters ("intelligent measurement devices", though I yet have to understand the concept of intelligence in relation to measuring electrons passing through) is a step into the direction of more visibiltiy. Making the data available to you and "others" is the next step. Because if you know what you consume and how others are behaving, you can decide to run your washing machine later or to switch off that idling TV. And you could see the impact.
"Others" is important because those "others" could be startups or existing companies who offer services based on your consumption data. Or who could allow you to sell and purchase the energy you or your friends produce directly to an from them.
**#AI can do cool stuff, but what's the value? **
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled over suno.ai, which is a song generator. Suno generates impressive result - with very little prompt and context, it generates results which range from "decent" to "wow".
From a business point of view, I have searched a long time for an application. Might be we can create customized on hold music? Or júst a song about anything?