Winning with AI Starts with Well-Prepared Data

No matter how advanced AI becomes, it will always come down to the quality and organization of the data it works with. Luckily AI can help with this!

I recently had the opportunity to join a panel at ARMA International’s InfoCon 2024 in Houston, and it was a thought-provoking discussion. The session, AI Is Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent, covered interesting ground, but there was one thing everyone agreed on:

AI is here to stay.

The question isn’t whether AI will disrupt industries; it’s how prepared organizations are to take advantage of it.

AI will automate the mundane. That was one of the points I raised in the panel. Tasks that consume hours or days for records and information management (RIM) teams—like classifying and organizing information—can be automated by AI, freeing professionals to focus on more strategic work.

AI success relies on data preparation.

But that automation won’t happen in a vacuum. AI’s success depends on the quality of the data it’s built on.

According to Gartner, 85 percent of AI projects will deliver erroneous outcomes due to bias in data, algorithms or the teams responsible for managing them. Furthermore, it predicts that 30% of GenAI projects will be abandoned by 2025, largely due to poor data quality.

As Gartner’s Research Vice President Jim Hare aptly states: “Data is the fuel for AI, so organizations need to prepare now to store and manage even larger amounts of data for AI initiatives”.

At EncompaaS, we believe the best first use case for AI, is to use it to organize and protect your data so that it is ready to power strategic AI initiatives. It can sort through your data, classify and de-risk it with incredible speed and accuracy, so your data can be safely leveraged.

As the demand for AI adoption grows, and data quality emerges as a key determinant of AI project success, executives will start asking RIM teams: How do we get our data ready to safely and rapidly take advantage of it? The companies that prioritize data preparation now will be the ones that thrive in the AI-driven future. That’s why I believe the RIM community has such a big role to play as this unfolds.

AI’s potential is only limited by the data it uses.

At EncompaaS, we leverage multiple AI services to find, enrich, organize and de-risk your unstructured and structured content into a normalized data quality foundation. Not only does this enable automated governance at scale for tasks like retention and disposition, but it also means you can now curate this well-prepared data to fuel upstream AI projects, ensuring you achieve safe, high-quality outcomes.

We meticulously prepare your data, transforming it into a strategic asset so for the first time you are able to ask smart, sophisticated questions and get smart sophisticated answers back. For example, legal teams can now use AI to sift through and extract important metadata from complex contracts to help them analyze their commercial positions in real time and identify opportunities and risks within their live contracts. While procurement teams can utilize AI to automate the generation and evaluation of complex RFPs.

AI is here to stay, but its output is only as good as the quality of the data you feed it. RIM professionals are in the perfect position to lead the charge, driving enterprise-wide, data-driven strategies that focus on specific, actionable AI solutions. The companies that prepare now will be the ones that win tomorrow.