Wiener Traditional IT Archetypes
The pre-AI baseline taxonomy of IT business models, against which weber-ai-startup-business-models positions its four AI archetypes. From Wiener et al. (2020), cited extensively in §2.2 of Weber et al.
The three archetypes
| Archetype | What it does |
|---|---|
| Data users | Use big data to streamline their own operations or to create new products/services |
| Data suppliers | Collect and sell data to other firms |
| Data facilitators | Enable other firms to use big data analytics (infrastructure, analytics-as-a-service) |
Cited Wiener et al. (2020); rooted in Hartmann et al. (2016).
Why this matters for the project
Weber et al.’s claim is that AI-charged Product/Service Providers (ai-charged-product-service-provider) genuinely depart from this triad: data is no longer analyzed to create insights — data is used to train embedded models. The other three Weber patterns (ai-development-facilitator, ai-data-analytics-provider, ai-deep-tech-researcher) all map onto extensions of the Wiener triad with ML inside:
- AI Development Facilitator ≈ Data Facilitator + AI tooling.
- Data Analytics Provider ≈ Data User / Data Facilitator with ML inside the analytics.
- Deep Tech Researcher ≈ Data Supplier + frontier R&D in many cases.
This is the load-bearing claim in §5 of weber-ai-startup-business-models: only one of the four AI patterns is qualitatively new; the others extend the pre-AI triad.
See also
- weber-ai-startup-business-models — the source citing this taxonomy.
- ai-startup-business-archetypes-weber — the four-pattern taxonomy positioned against this triad.
- ai-charged-product-service-provider — the one Weber pattern claimed as genuinely new.
- ecosystem-business-archetypes — Choudary’s horizontal-ecosystem taxonomy, a third complementary lens.