The effect of data maturity on AI maturity

As part of my MBA capstone project I looked into the relationship between data quality, data governance, and AI maturity. Below the executive summary and the full report will become public soon.

There is mainstream acceptance that AI is a new strategic lever for big corporations, and there is consensus on the need for data to take full advantage of AI. Considering the rise of AI, we need to get fresh insight into the relation between data maturity and AI maturity. This insight gives us more precision in the required data management capabilities to enable AI.

Looking more closely at data maturity we see that while data maturity overall enables AI maturity, data governance is more important to enable AI maturity than data quality. In traditional data management high data quality is the goal because it enables efficient business processes, improves risk and control management, enables business intelligence, and enables data-driven insights. But next to this we now need to consider AI maturity, and for this data governance is more important.

AI maturity for this paper grows along the axes of AI pipelines, AI alignment, AI operationalisation, and AI skills and culture. Data maturity splits into data governance and data quality. Increased levels of data governance maturity also link to increased data quality, however as the research in this paper shows, there is more: data governance increases the AI maturity of an organisation in ways a focus just on data quality cannot do.

As the conversation on AI readiness shifts from discussions around technology towards organisational readiness, culture changes, upskilling, and employee acceptance; so does the conversation around data management’s contribution towards AI needs to shift from a focus on cleaning bad data towards increasing an organisation’s data governance capability. Data quality is still important to achieve outcomes in AI, but data quality only affects a part of AI maturity, while data governance increases all aspects of AI maturity. Management needs to consider more focus on data governance if it wants to increase an organisation’s AI maturity.