(who-is-Danny/Shutterstock)
Chief knowledge officers have quite a lot of challenges on their plates as of late: knowledge integration, safety, privateness, compliance, cloud migrations, and IT workers and sources, to call a couple of. However a whopping 68% of CDOs in a current report recognized knowledge high quality as their primary downside. The driving power behind the surge within the consciousness of information high quality falls squarely on the emergence of generative AI, says Mike McKee, the CEO of Ataccama.
“AI has been that catalyst to look extra intently at knowledge high quality,” McKee mentioned. “The nearer that folks have seemed, the extra involved they get, and because of this, it’s gone means up the precedence checklist for folks to handle.”
Ataccama commissioned Hannover Analysis to survey about 300 senior knowledge professionals within the US, UK, and Canada in late 2024. The outcomes of that survey, which Ataccama revealed in its newly launched Information Belief Report 2025, present the numerous enterprises are going through challenges of their plans to maneuver ahead with GenAI instantly due to points with knowledge high quality.
“AI fashions are solely as efficient as the information they depend on,” Ataccama says in its report. “And when that knowledge is unhealthy, the results are far-reaching.” Impacts of unhealthy knowledge, the corporate says, embrace: inaccurate insights, operational slow-downs, waste of sources, jeopardized compliance initiatives, and lowered ROI.
The report additionally discovered that legacy programs share quite a lot of the blame. They’re ill-quipped to deal with growing knowledge volumes, and lots of have been designed to offer interval knowledge updates, not the continual, real-time streams demanded by AI, Ataccama says. Sustaining knowledge high quality throughout the group is a problem for 41% of respondents, the corporate says. These are all the explanation why simply 33% of organizations report significant progress in AI adoption, the corporate says within the report.
Information development exacerbates knowledge high quality points (Yurchanka Siarhei/Shutterstock)
Information high quality has been an issue because the first byte was written. There are untold ways in which knowledge can go unhealthy (with human error main the best way), and knowledge professionals have spent numerous hours attempting to handle them.
As an illustration, through the knowledge warehousing period, corporations embarked upon heavy-handed, top-down initiatives in an try and dictate knowledge high quality requirements for the group. When knowledge volumes have been decrease, corporations might get away with brute-force approaches, resembling grasp knowledge administration (MDM) initiatives that outlined a centralized “golden document” that may very well be relied upon for decision-making.
However these boil-the-ocean approaches aren’t efficient in immediately’s massive knowledge setting. For a wide range of causes–together with the proliferation of information silos (each on-prem and within the cloud), the fast growth of use instances, and the emergence of unstructured knowledge as a valued useful resource–knowledge high quality has gotten worse as volumes go up.
The perfect that corporations can do is attempt to apply out there sources to probably the most urgent knowledge high quality problem at hand, McKee says.
“Making an attempt to grasp all these completely different knowledge sources can rapidly turn out to be a idiot’s errand,” he says. “Indisputably, the piece of recommendation is begin with the enterprise initiative. Don’t begin with a theoretical knowledge undertaking. [Ask yourself] what space of the enterprise are you attempting to enhance? What space of the of the enterprise has the least belief within the knowledge and wishes to handle knowledge high quality points first?
Mike McKee joined Ataccama as CEO in August, 2023
“To run this advertising and marketing marketing campaign, I can simply use these 5 knowledge sources,” he continues. “I do know there’s 25 knowledge sources, but when I really take data from these 5 knowledge sources, match and merge, convey that collectively, know what the proper data is or the grasp data from a subset of the sources, then I’m driving that enterprise initiative higher.”
Whereas we’ll by no means have good knowledge, there may be huge room for enchancment on what we have now immediately. Many corporations battle to enact significant analytics because of misspelled names, inaccurate addresses, clean fields, and deliberately incorrect knowledge entered into types. Each firm struggles to purge these errors from their databases and file programs, however the problem has turn out to be much more urgent since we’ve tried to make use of this knowledge for GenAI.
“I feel a giant turning level was ChatGPT a few years in the past,” McKee tells BigDATAwire in an interview. “Rapidly, individuals are speaking about AI. Rapidly, the boards and the enterprise leaders are like, hey, are you able to begin utilizing AI? And swiftly, the CIOs of the world who’ve been engaged on these knowledge tasks for thus lengthy, they’re like, ‘Hey, we’ve been working these knowledge tasks. You didn’t care about them then. Now you care a lot.’”
The persevering with explosion of information is placing the onus on knowledge stewards and knowledge engineers to trace down and repair knowledge high quality issues, McKee says.
“You could have a set quantity of information professionals attempting to deal with an exploding quantity of information, which, as soon as once more, goes to have a unfavorable affect on knowledge high quality and the necessity to have automated knowledge high quality instruments to handle that concern,” he says.
Ataccama is looking for to handle the information high quality downside via automation. It employs machine studying and AI to assist with the matching and merging capabilities in its knowledge high quality product, and in addition to automate a lot of the rule creation and rule documentation work, McKee says. It additionally makes use of GenAI strategies to assist enhance knowledge high quality to bolster different downstream GenAI tasks, an excellent instance of the virtuous cycle of information and AI.
However higher knowledge high quality instruments can solely get you thus far. Of their 2025 AI & Information Management Govt Benchmark Survey, Randy Bean and Tom Davenport discovered that 92% of respondents “consider that the first barrier to establishing data- and AI-driven cultures is folks and group change-based, and solely 8% thought expertise was the wrongdoer.”
Information investments are growing (Supply: “2025 AI & Information Management Govt Benchmark Survey” by Randy Bean and Tom Davenport)
In relation to the significance of information high quality, nonetheless, Davenport and Bean, who’s an advisor to Ataccama, are in full settlement with Ataccama and McKee: GenAI is exposing a knowledge high quality as the huge downside that it’s.
“…[A]s a consequence of the fast improve in curiosity and dedication to AI funding, a rising share of organizations are actually specializing in their knowledge initiatives as nicely,” Bean and Davenport write. “It’s more and more understood that the standard of AI is essentially dependent upon the standard of the information that’s out there.”
The excellent news is that the popularity of the issue of information high quality is resulting in extra sources being dedicated to it, each by way of increasing the human and organizational heft wanted to assault it, in addition to shopping for higher instruments. Of their 2025 AI & Information Management Govt Benchmark Survey, Bean and Davenport notice that investments in knowledge and GenAI are growing. So is the p.c of decision-makers who say that knowledge and AI are a high precedence.
Ataccama can be seeing this pattern affect its income. Whereas the Boston-based firm doesn’t focus completely on knowledge high quality, it’s the heritage of the corporate, which has its roots within the Czech Republic. In accordance with McKee, bookings elevated 100% within the final 12 months, whereas top-line income jumped 30%. That signifies corporations are recognizing and responding to the issue, he says.
“I might say that extra organizations are prioritizing it…and I feel we’ll see main enhancements within the subsequent two to 3 years,” McKee predicts. “I feel we’re kind of within the ‘admit you’ve an issue’ stage. When you admit you’ve an issue, search for options. After which as you search for options, you then’ll begin to see an enchancment general.”
Associated Gadgets:
Ataccama Introduces AI Agent For Enhanced Information Administration
Overcoming the Monetary Implications of Poor Information High quality
Information High quality Getting Worse, Report Says
