"Data is the new oil!" was the title of a talk given by data scientist Clive Humby in 2006 at an Association of National Advertisers conference. In his talk, Humby claimed that raw data has to be processed just like crude oil has to be refined in order to have value.

In 2006, he coined the phrase “Data is the new oil”, drawing analogies with the revolution that oil produced for industry and how data shares many of the challenges in the process of refining, building by-products and distilling data to make it useful to drive business innovation.

In 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby is said to have coined the phrase “data is the new oil” but over the interceding 17 years, what he actually meant by that has got rather lost. “Like oil, data is valuable,” he said.

When British mathematician Clive Humby declared in 2006 that “data is the new oil,” he meant that data, like oil, isn't useful in its raw state. It needs to be refined, processed and turned into something useful; its value lies in its potential.