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Data integrity is key to business success in 2024, say Experts

2023 saw a surge in the utilisation of generative AI tools, and this is only expected to continue in the coming years.

However, as more organisations and individuals become increasingly familiar with sophisticated technologies such as generative AI, there will also be more awareness around the data that it is fed, and whether this data is trustworthy. Meanwhile, timelier and more accurate ESG reporting is increasingly required to satisfy business’ stakeholders and regulators; a more accurate, consistent, and contextualised approach to reporting on ESG metrics is now needed to meet these requirements.

In almost every industry, a robust data integrity strategy helps companies achieve and maintain trusted data, fuelling more dependable results, and allowing confident data-driven decisions to be made to help grow the business, stay agile, reduce costs, and manage risk and compliance. With this in mind, experts from Precisely, the leader in data integrity, share their predictions on how consistent, accurate, and contextual data will encourage business success in 2024 and beyond.

Data integrity for AI

Tendü Yoğurtçu, PhD, Chief Technology Officer at Precisely comments:

“While artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days, the truth is, very few organisations have AI-ready data in place to power successful business outcomes. In 2024, we expect organisations to continue implementing traditional AI to increase efficiency in both the back and front office, while exploring how generative AI can create new capabilities, products, and services. In the process, businesses will increasingly realise that data is central to their AI success.

“Organisations will seek to integrate all their relevant and critical on-prem and cloud data into the datasets used to train their AI models – including complex data residing on mainframes – to minimise bias and improve the accuracy of their AI outcomes.

“Businesses will also work to increase trust in the quality of data used by their AI systems. Ensuring that data meets rigorous quality metrics related to validity, accuracy, completeness, standardisation, and more is just the first step. Organisations will need AI governance to reduce risks, make sure AI is used in an ethical and responsible way and build trust among stakeholders. AI and data governance frameworks will be critical for organisations to ensure AI initiatives have the best possible outcomes while minimising risk.

“Finally, organisations will look to augment their data with third-party datasets and spatial insights for additional context that allows AI to grasp nuances, maintain coherence, and generate contextually relevant responses.

“Data integrity is the key that unlocks the full potential of all AI models, traditional and generative AI alike. Data integration, data quality and governance, location intelligence, and data enrichment enable organisations to have access to accurate, consistent, and contextually relevant data that gives them confidence in their AI initiatives. As generative AI continues to evolve next year, data integrity will play a pivotal role in elevating AI initiatives to new heights and delivering trustworthy and dependable results that propel businesses toward success.”

ESG Reporting

Pat McCarthy, Chief Revenue Officer at Precisely, says:

“ESG data management and reporting strategy take on a whole new meaning in 2024 with the application of the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which started on 1st January. The CSRD elevates and standardises corporate sustainability like never before and will ultimately impact nearly 50,000 companies, including U.S. companies with operations in the EU. The implications are widespread on organisations, and we will increasingly see sustainability data being treated and governed with a similar level of rigour as other strategic data such as financials, sales, and customer data.

“To meet mandatory formats of ESG disclosure and reporting standards, businesses will need to implement robust data integrity strategies to ensure the accuracy, consistency, and context of their data. Without this in place, many organisations face challenges with data that lives in silos, is incomplete, unstandardised, or lacks the detail required to make it fit for purpose. This is not sufficient for the thorough level of insights required to make strategic decisions.

“More than ever before, companies require trustworthy data to make confident decisions, set goals, and track the progress of sustainability initiatives. If companies aren’t already investing in the integrity of their data, they are already behind the curve and any new ESG regulations introduced will only continue to widen that gap.”

Hybrid cloud

Eric Yau, Chief Operating Officer at Precisely, says:

“In 2024, we’ll see companies under even more pressure to deliver advanced analytics, explore new uses for AI, and keep up with customer demands for up-to-the-minute insights. In response, organisations will need to move further into their hybrid and multi-cloud journeys – breaking down data silos and ensuring access to trusted data in as close to real-time as possible. As companies continue to see the combined power of mainframe and cloud environments, they will focus on which workloads and applications are best suited for the cloud and which should remain on-premises.

“Ultimately, hybrid cloud success will rely on a robust data integrity strategy, allowing organisations to access valuable data from modern and legacy systems, proactively detect issues, deliver the highest-quality data, uncover previously hidden relationships, and enrich data with added context.”

Data context – Dan Adams, Senior Vice President – Data Strategy & Operations at Precisely:
“Although companies have been creating more valuable data with data enrichment and geo addressing for some time, we can expect this to accelerate in 2024. Adapting to changing patterns of work between office and home, combined with the rise of consumer organisations such as Uber, Airbnb, and Just Eat, has demonstrated just how valuable location intelligence and enriched data can be to business models. In fact, IDC even predicts that, by 2025, the combination of geolocation and business analytics will be universally adopted by the top Global 2000 companies.

“We will see companies prioritising solutions that help them to build the consistency and accuracy of their data as well as enriching it for additional context. AI will be a key driver for this, as enhancing data with additional trusted geolocation information increases the certainty of an AI model’s outputs to automate decisions and increase the speed of gaining insights. Companies looking to unlock the full potential of AI models in 2024 will increasingly invest in understanding data lineage as an essential element of their data integrity strategy.”

Data governance and AI

Emily Washington, Senior Vice President – Product Management at Precisely, says:

“As enterprises look into how AI can benefit their organisations, using governed and verified data sets will bring confidence to the decisions and outcomes that are generated by AI. Internal data marketplaces are based on data sets managed by a product owner that is governed and verified. This ownership of data provides a data product that can be used with confidence because it has been organised as a singular asset or product with a purpose. It takes into account any local influences on the data and can be easily tailored to fit any business need by bringing together concepts of data governance and the distributed nature of data mesh into one data product.”