Day 3. A field note on enterprise AI adoption.
The companies getting real leverage out of AI right now aren't the ones with the biggest model budgets. They're the ones with the cleanest operational data — and the discipline to keep it that way.
AI maturity curves look like this in practice:
1. Prototype on whatever data is easiest to grab.
2. Realize the outputs are only as good as the inputs.
3. Rebuild data pipelines, naming conventions, and ownership.
4. Now the AI actually compounds.
Most orgs stall at step 2 and blame the model. It's almost never the model.
If your AI roadmap doesn't include a data hygiene roadmap, you don't have an AI roadmap.