Dive Brief:
- Strong enterprise data foundations translate to better returns on AI investments, but only 8% of enterprises describe their data as ready to support AI, a Dun & Bradstreet survey of 10,000 businesses across 32 countries found. Another 33% of businesses surveyed described their data as mostly ready and 44% as partially ready.
- Among companies with fully AI-ready data, 81% are seeing strong AI returns, compared with just 12% of companies reporting partially-ready data, the survey found. Businesses in the Americas tended to be the most likely to increase AI spending while reporting the second-lowest rates of strong ROI and mostly or fully AI-ready data.
- “What stands out this quarter is how much data readiness matters,” Gary Kotovets, chief data and analytics officer at Dun & Bradstreet, said in a press release. “The organizations whose data is ready for AI are seeing broad returns at a much higher rate than everyone else.”
Dive Insight:
Data is becoming an ever-critical underpinning of enterprise AI as CIOs look to build strong foundations supporting the technology’s business context needs.
“The next phase of AI adoption will be defined less by access to models and more by the quality of the information those models can use,” Kotovets said.
Poor data foundations are often the root cause of enterprise AI initiatives falling short, according to 72% of AI decision-makers surveyed for a Collibra report. A lack of structured context is a key contributor to more manual supervision for IT teams overseeing AI agents, the survey found.
Google Cloud and MIT Technology Review Insights found a similar pattern in an August report. Without a full understanding of the enterprise data estate, including unstructured data, businesses “do not have the quality and trust to activate agents at scale,” according to the research. Only 10% of companies have scaled agents widely across the business, the report found.
Reimagining the data foundation became a key part of Heineken’s AI journey. The multinational brewing company viewed data as the building blocks for decision-making intelligence, Frank Iannella, U.S. CIO and SVP for digital technology at Heineken, said during the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in October.
Iannella’s team aimed to create decision-ready data aligned to business use cases. Some questions Ianella said he considers when it comes to data is whether it’s current, if it’s the appropriate quality to enable action and if it’s connected to the right use case levers.
