There is a quiet revolution happening inside every laptop, smartphone, classroom server, and enterprise data centre on the planet. It does not announce itself with fanfare. It arrives instead as a slightly faster autocomplete suggestion, a document summarised in seconds, a security threat neutralised before any human analyst even noticed it. Artificial intelligence has slipped, almost imperceptibly, into the fabric of everyday computing. And with it has come something that the industry is only beginning to grapple with honestly: an almost incomprehensible explosion in the volume, velocity, and variety of data that the world must store, move, and make sense of.