How To Implement Data Management Into Your AI Strategy

The first impression most of us have about AI is likely from the sci-fi movies where robots overpower humans. Remember the films like “Terminator” or novels like “Robopocalypse”? Given the pace of development in the space of AI, we are witnessing the gap between fiction and reality closing day by day. 

In fact, we have witnessed the initial phase of the AI evolution — from rules-based to the latest generative AI. According to a recent study by McKinsey, AI is expected to add $13 trillion to the global economy by 2030. With the recent advancements in ML, AI has started showing traits unique to human intelligence, such as problem-solving, perception, and even the ability to be creative and exhibit social intelligence. But can it do it without the data? Let’s explore this concept. 

Data Is the Core of AI Strategies

While an AI strategy has different components, including infrastructure, technology stack, organizational changes, and more, the most important is the data strategy. A well-defined data strategy is the foundation for successful AI implementation. Data is often referred to as the "fuel" for AI, and for good reason. AI algorithms learn from data, making data quality, quantity, and accessibility paramount. Hence, the success of any AI initiative depends on an enterprise's ability to access, process, and analyze data at scale and effectively throughout the data lifecycle — from collection and storage to data engineering and integration to data analysis and workflow development. However, with this comes the potential for issues as well. Read on to learn more.

Data for AI: 5 Data Management Concerns and How to Approach Them

While AI has immense potential to transform our lives, you can't ignore the serious concerns related to integrating data at scale, data privacy, data quality, bias in algorithms, and ethical considerations. As we move forward, it's essential to harness the power of data and AI responsibly and create strategies to address these hurdles. Here are some best practices to consider. 

1. Select an Appropriate Technology Stack

One of the biggest challenges is to select the most appropriate solution from a wide range of data integration and management tools and platforms available. Enterprises should consider factors such as the type of data, the complexity of the problem, the computational resources required, ease of use, opportunity to scale, cost, inbuilt support for AI and DataOps, etc. when deciding on the tech stack.

2. Address the AI Bias

Many of us can perceive AI as more objective than humans, and we may implicitly trust its decisions and the content it generates. But at the end of the day, these decisions and content are primarily driven by the training datasets and learnings from the feedback loop. 

Another thing that leads to data bias is the level of completeness of data. How you handle data sets coming from the extreme ends of the spectrums, data orphans, and outliers, and determines how inconsistent your data quality is. To alleviate this, enterprises should use diverse datasets, make provisions for regular auditing and testing with different stakeholders, and identify and address bias in AI algorithms.

3. Mitigate Data Privacy Risks

As AI solutions evolve, so does their ability to use personal information. In their goal to provide a more contextualized and personalized experience, AI algorithms analyze a vast amount of personal and sensitive data, which might lead to privacy and security concerns. When developing AI solutions, enterprises must minimize the collection and sharing of personal information as much as possible. Wherever necessary, there should be provisions for seeking end users' consent or giving more control to them to decide on what data could be leveraged. Robust data privacy and security measures to protect sensitive information should also be in place.

4. Maintain AI Transparency

The performance and accuracy of different AI systems depend heavily on the training dataset. However, collecting, storing, and managing this data raises concerns about privacy and security. Enterprises must ensure the protection of user data and maintain transparency about its usage. Customers and stakeholders should be informed and communicated openly about AI-driven decisions and their impact. Ensure visibility into data lineage and have impact analysis done, to comply with potential AI regulations and audits. Transparency is a significant part of "explainable AI" and gaining end users’ trust.

5. Constantly Co-Relating Datasets With Business Outcomes

Finally, enterprises need to continuously monitor and evaluate AI solutions to ensure they meet business objectives and ethical standards. Enterprises need to work on improving the quality of data and ML techniques based on the learnings.  To get the most out of any AI solution implement those learnings after it is evaluated or approved by humans in the initial stages/cycles.

Let’s review the building blocks that you need to consider when handling the above concerns.

3 Data Components to Consider When Building an AI Strategy

From our experience of working with global organizations across a myriad of industries in the data management space, we have realized that scalable, high-quality, well-governed data is the bedrock for impactful AI. Here are the key components of a robust data strategy that we believe enterprises should consider as part of their AI strategy:

1. Data Integration

AI solutions often require data from multiple sources, such as internal databases, external APIs or third-party datasets. For AI models to succeed you need robust data integration and interoperability frameworks between different data formats and structures to ensure data is collected in a structured and consistent manner. The tool needs the ability to handle inconsistent data structures like semi and unstructured data at any latency - be it in batch or real-time. This could involve data pipelines, extract, load, transform (ELT), or extract, transform, load (ETL) processes. One big part of AI transparency is the visibility into data lineage- where the data is coming from, how it is transformed, and where it is going. The right data integration strategy not only sets up your tech stack but also makes sure you have access to any data, even when there is a change in objectives, requirements, technologies, applications, frameworks, and others.

To make it easier for data scientists and analysts, choose an integration solution that smoothly synchronizes with your AI models and feeds the data without much technical intervention. In case of a change in data or schema, your tool should automatically track the changes and integrate the data accordingly. 

2. Data Quality

Data quality is paramount for AI solutions to generate accurate and reliable insights. The foundation of any AI system is as good as the training data. If the data quality is not up to snuff, it will lead to inconsistent and unreliable AI decisions. This is why the training data must be cleansed and standardized to remove errors, inconsistencies, and duplicate records. Enterprises must ensure that the training data is accurate, complete, diverse, relevant, and represents the real-world problem they are trying to solve. At times, given the non-availability of quality data, you can also leverage AI for synthetic data generation.

To stay true to business outcomes and unbiased AI results, ensuring data quality is very important. 

3. Data Governance

Data governance refers to the framework and processes that ensure data availability, integrity, and security. Establishing clear data governance policies and procedures is crucial to maintaining data reliability and trustworthiness and ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, etc. This could include defining data ownership, access controls, classification, lineage, or retention policies. To mitigate data privacy risks, setting up a governance framework, and aligning it across people, processes, and systems is crucial. 

Untangle Data Problems to Master AI

Data will help you cut through the smoke and mirrors of the AI world. But to build a solid data foundation you need a versatile and flexible data integration and management platform that will make sure your AI initiatives get access to any data, regardless of sources, types, volumes, velocity, and formats. Don’t let data governance be an afterthought. If you can trust and secure your data, it’s more likely that you will scale your AI-based projects faster and with confidence.  Enterprises should focus on getting their data and AI strategy right to achieve their business objectives. With the right approach and the solution that best supports the approach, AI promises to usher in an era of unprecedented innovation and progress.

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