The Challenges of AI and Customer Data

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Artificial Intelligence  

Artificial intelligence solutions aren’t magic. While that may seem hard to believe when you read some of the fantastic claims made about them (generally by the developers of AI solutions!), the simple fact is that they rely on data to do what they do.

A lot of data.

A lot of data that needs to be consistent, accurate and complete.

That alone is a problem for many organizations, so there are a lot of concerted efforts going on to try to improve, cleanse, convert, integrate or otherwise manipulate historic data so that it is in a location and format that AI tools can leverage. Without data, organizations are limited to generic AI tools that take their data from publicly available sources.

However, there is another data-related issue that a lot of organizations are going to have to deal with: how client data is used. Consulting firms, organizations with professional services arms, and other companies that operate in a business-to-business way are going to have specific client data in their systems, and very few of those organizations have any wording in their agreements with those clients that is specific to the use of AI.

The issue isn’t limited to business clients, either. While consumer data has been used in many different ways by organizations for years, that has generally been in the form of metadata rather than specific information on individuals.…

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