Every business we speak to has an AI tool it is excited about. Very few, however, can tell you how good the data behind it actually is, and that is the part that decides whether the tool actually works.
AI does not create good outcomes by itself, it runs on its inputs. Feed it clean, well-understood data, and it turns into a genuine edge, producing sharper forecasts, faster reporting, and decisions made with real confidence. Feed it messy or inconsistent data, and it generates something that sounds just as sharp and confident, but is wrong.
It is the same trap as a calculator given one wrong number to start with. Get the input wrong, and it will still spit out an answer to two decimal places. The calculator will not tell you that you entered the wrong data, and AI will not tell you either. A wrong number produces a result that looks exactly as confident as one that is right. The mistake does not get caught at the point it is made. It gets caught later, sometimes much later, once important decisions have already been made because of it.
Everyone is excited about what the AI tool can do, and we get it, the potential of AI is huge and genuinely game-changing for plenty of teams and organisations. But nobody seems to be asking what the AI is actually working from.
If the right data is fed in, AI becomes a genuine advantage, delivering decisions made faster and with real confidence behind them. Get the data wrong, and you are ultimately helping AI make bad decisions look official, and at speed.
Businesses getting the most out of AI are the ones who take the quality of their data every bit as seriously as the technology sitting on top of it. No matter how sophisticated the AI tool gets, it was never going to flag that the input was wrong to begin with. That part is still down to us humans!
Contact Lorraine at lorraine.oleary@barden.ie or on LinkedIn
