Company Video

Data Infrastructure and the Next Phase of AI

Andre Williams interviews Aleks Jakulin about the internet's extraction problem, the limits of synthetic media, and why AI needs roots in high-quality data.

Why Listen

This conversation is a clear introduction to the core data.Flowers thesis: AI is only as trustworthy as the data ecosystem beneath it. Jakulin argues that the internet was built as communications infrastructure, then commercialized through extraction. AI now accelerates that extraction by turning online material into synthetic text, images, audio, and video without repairing the data layer it depends on.

The practical case is simple. If organizations want useful AI, they need data that has provenance, stewardship, and economic sustainability. For data.Flowers, that begins with business associations, chambers of commerce, event organizers, and other institutions that already know which companies are credible in their ecosystems.

To trust AI, we need to trust the data.

The Big Idea

Jakulin frames data infrastructure by comparison with electricity. A device should not have to know the reputation of every power plant before it plugs in. Likewise, a person, search engine, or AI agent should not have to manually inspect every source before using basic company, product, or people data. Good data should flow from accountable stewards.

This is also where data sovereignty matters. The interview distinguishes privacy by promise from privacy by design: instead of handing data to a giant platform and hoping it behaves, sovereign data infrastructure gives the rightful steward control over access, use, updates, and compensation.

Best For

Edited Transcript Highlights

Andre Williams: What inspired data.Flowers?

Aleks Jakulin: data.Flowers is an attempt to create a data ecosystem for the next phase of AI and intelligence. We want people to access high-quality information and high-quality advice. The limiting factor right now is not so much AI technology itself, but the data that is the core ingredient in the answers AI generates.

Andre Williams: For a non-technical person, what is data.Flowers? Is it a platform? Is it software?

Aleks Jakulin: It is all of those things, but the way to think about it is infrastructure. AI needs computational infrastructure, but it also needs data infrastructure. Without that data infrastructure, you get garbage in, garbage out. data.Flowers is an answer to that problem: data.Flowers in, blossoming AI out.

Andre Williams: What can data.Flowers do today?

Aleks Jakulin: A very important part of data is data about people, companies, and products. Associations, chambers of commerce, and event organizers often know which companies are trustworthy and how they fit together. That insight is incredibly important, but it is not always digital in a way humans and AIs can use. We give those organizations better tools and help high-quality businesses get discovered.

Andre Williams: What is data infrastructure?

Aleks Jakulin: The internet is communications infrastructure. It solves how to get information from point A to point B. Data infrastructure means you should be able to get certain information without worrying about what server provides it, what its reputation is, what it costs, or how to pay for it. Data should flow the way power does: high-quality data at a reasonable price, wherever you are.

Andre Williams: Where does data sovereignty fit?

Aleks Jakulin: Data sovereignty is the realization that data needs to belong to someone. It cannot just be somewhere on the internet where you do not know who controls it. A business association or chamber of commerce should be sovereign with respect to its data about members and what they do. That sovereignty creates accountability, compensation, and credit.