Dive Brief:
- Business leaders are overly confident in the data strategies underpinning AI plans, according to the Actian State of Data Governance Maturity 2025 report published in late July. Executives rated their organization's data maturity 12% higher than those working with data daily, the survey of more than 600 enterprise data pros found.
- Even as senior decision-makers hold their data strategies in high regard, enterprises face a multitude of challenges. Nearly 90% of data pros reported difficulty with scaling and complexity, and more than 4 in 5 pointed to governance and compliance issues. Organizations also grapple with access and security risks, as well as data quality, trust and skills gaps.
- To address the litany of obstacles, organizations are prioritizing data governance. More than half of those surveyed expect strengthened governance to significantly improve AI implementation, data quality and trust in business decisions.
Dive Insight:
CIOs are feeling a renewed sense of urgency to ameliorate data dilemmas as the C-suite bets big on AI in pursuit of productivity gains and streamlined processes.
“AI acts as both a critical driver and a primary challenge for data governance," Emma McGrattan, CTO of Actian, said in a statement.
For organizations racing to deploy AI across workflows, upgrades to data processes are in order. More than 4 in 5 decision-makers said data ownership has shifted over the last year as AI efforts increased, according to a Collibra survey published in April.
More changes are likely to come as organizations embark on agentic AI adoption journeys.
“Agents will need to get the nice, structured information from the database, but also the unstructured information and that’s 80% of the information in a company,” Stijn Christiaens, co-founder and chief data citizen at Collibra, told CIO Dive. “The challenging part about unstructured data has always been that it lives in very separate worlds… it was just too hard and too complicated to extract valuable data points out of Google Drive or a PDF, for example.”
Poor data frameworks and bad hygiene threaten enterprise ambitions, erode trust and increase costs. CIOs who can accurately assess the resiliency and sustainability of data strategies can better helm future AI efforts.
“For agents to properly work, we do need to finally fix data problems,” Christiaens said. “There’s a lot of complexities coming.”
