ByJohn Sviokla,
Contributor.
The most expensive piece of advice in enterprise technology right now is five words long: get your data ready first.
It is everywhere. The World Economic Forum reports that 72% of enterprises plan to prioritize data foundations and pipelines as their fastest-growing AI investment this year. Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by "AI-ready" data. Cloudera’s latest global survey found that 96% of IT leaders report AI integration — but nearly 80% say their initiatives are constrained by limited data access, and only 18% describe their data as fully governed. A Fivetran benchmark of more than 500 senior data and technology leaders found that 73% of enterprise data initiatives fail to meet expectations, despite average annual data spending of $29.3 million per organization.
The diagnosis is always the same: more governance, more cleaning, more pipeline engineering. Get the data house in order, then deploy AI.
