Beyond the Hype: Why Clean Data is Your AI’s Secret Weapon for Executive Insight

AI agents are only as good as the data you feed them. (Michael Piepgras)

Executives are constantly seeking new ways to gain a competitive advantage and accelerate decision-making. Generative AI (GenAI) and AI agents promise exactly that, offering the ability to quickly derive valuable insights from your data. In a matter of minutes, GenAI can analyze spreadsheets, categorize unstructured data, and even generate machine learning scripts to predict outcomes, saving significant time and money compared to traditional methods. I’ve seen an executive go from spreadsheet to detailed analysis in 20 minutes and generate a complex machine learning script in the same timeframe with just a few prompts.

However, there’s a critical, often overlooked foundation to these powerful applications: clean, high-quality data. Just as you wouldn’t trust a report based on flawed numbers, your AI agents are only as good as the data you feed them.

An Unseen Challenge: The Pain of Data Cleansing

While building a simple AI agent might seem easy — I recently developed one with fewer than 100 lines of code and deployed it with simple command-line instructions, and I even wrote a conversational chatbot in less than ten minutes — achieving quality results is something altogether different. The core mantra in data analysis, which…