Unlocking the True Value of AI

The excitement around AI is undeniable. The promise of smarter decision-making, automation, and efficiency has led businesses of all sizes to jump on the AI bandwagon. A survey by Databricks showed that organizations are more eager than ever to implement AI into their operations, hoping it will unlock new avenues of growth and productivity. But here’s the catch—AI is only as good as the data it’s built on.

You might be tempted to think that AI can work its magic regardless of the data it’s fed. But the truth is, no amount of tuning or fancy algorithms can compensate for poor-quality data. And here lies the dilemma: companies are rushing to adopt AI while overlooking the most crucial element—data quality.

Why Data Quality Should Be Your First Priority

Imagine you’re trying to cook a gourmet meal with expired ingredients. No matter how skilled you are in the kitchen, the outcome will never be great. This is the same with AI—no matter how advanced or sophisticated your AI model is, if it’s trained on unreliable or flawed data, the results will be poor.

Data quality issues are more common than you might think, and the cost of ignoring them can be staggering. A well-known example is Unity Software, which lost around $100 million in ad revenue in 2022. The culprit? Their machine learning models were learning from bad data[1]. This is a prime example of how poor data can turn AI from a business asset into a costly liability.

Companies often spend more time and money than expected cleaning and fixing bad data, yet they still fail to address the root of the problem. An article by SAP says that the cost of bad data is about $3 trillion dollar annually[2], and yet many organizations don’t actively focus on fixing this. Instead, they patch the issues after the fact, like plugging holes in a sinking ship without addressing the underlying structural flaws.

The Hidden Challenge

One of the key reasons data quality remains poor in many organizations is the way teams work in silos. You’ve got data engineers who generate the data without much thought about how it will be used, and then data scientists or analysts are expected to make meaningful decisions based on that same data. Well, thinking about it, it goes deeper from software engineering down to analyst.

This disconnect leads to what we see in so many businesses: teams spending an enormous amount of time cleaning, filtering, and transforming data, instead of working on building insights. In fact, it’s estimated that data scientists spend around 40% of their time just preparing data for analysis. That’s a massive waste of talent and resources, and it happens because the foundational work of ensuring data quality is often neglected at the source.

And when data quality issues are finally discovered downstream, it’s usually too late to fix them without causing major disruptions. By the time you realize a key report or prediction is flawed, decisions have already been made, and the consequences can be devastating.

Learning From Costly Mistakes

The financial cost of poor data quality is difficult to ignore. Unity Software’s $100 million loss is just one of many examples where bad data severely impacted a business. Whether it’s inaccurate reporting, flawed customer insights, or faulty product recommendations, the ripple effects of poor-quality data can lead to wasted resources, lost revenue, and damage to customer trust.

But here’s the frustrating part: it’s often not until something goes wrong—until the losses are staring us in the face—that businesses realize the importance of data quality. The real question is, why aren’t companies focusing on this from the start?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that data quality is often seen as a “back office” issue—something that’s technical and tedious, and only gets attention when it causes a visible problem. But if businesses started thinking of data quality as a strategic priority, they could prevent those costly mistakes before they happen.

Shifting Your Focus to Unlock AI’s True Value

So how do you unlock AI’s true potential? It starts with putting data quality front and center. Treat data as the foundation of your AI and machine learning initiatives. If the data feeding your models is reliable, consistent, and clean, the insights generated by your AI will be trustworthy. If not, no amount of model tweaking will save you.

Here are a few ways to ensure your data quality remains high:

• Start at the source: Data quality efforts should begin the moment data enters your system. Whether it’s from user input, sensors, or external providers, make sure there’s a process to validate and clean the data from the very start.

• Break down silos: Collaboration between teams is essential. Data engineers, data scientists, and business stakeholders should be in constant communication to ensure the data being collected is actually useful and relevant for its intended purpose.

• Continuously monitor your data: Data quality is not a one-time fix. It requires ongoing monitoring and improvement. Implement tools and practices that continuously validate the accuracy, consistency, and completeness of your data as it flows through your systems.

• Learn from mistakes: Don’t wait for a costly data error to highlight the importance of data quality. Look at case studies like Unity Software, where poor data cost millions, and use them as learning opportunities to avoid similar mistakes.

The Key to AI’s Future

AI is undeniably the future of business, but its potential can’t be realized if companies don’t get their data right. Data quality is often an invisible issue—overlooked until it causes a very visible problem. The sooner businesses make data quality a priority, the more value they’ll unlock from AI, and the fewer resources they’ll waste on preventable errors.

As we move into an era where data-driven decision-making is becoming the norm, the companies that succeed will be the ones that understand this simple truth: AI can only be as good as the data that fuels it. So, before you rush into AI, stop and ask yourself—Is your data ready for the future?

References:

• https://www.anaconda.com/resources/whitepapers/state-of-data-science-report-2022