A decade ago, business visionaries said, “every company is now a tech company.” Then it was “every company now is a data company.” Now, there’s a new game in town: every company is (or should be) an AI company. Accenture and Avanade believe this isn’t a change in direction, nor a contradiction from those earlier perspectives. It’s a natural, if rapid, evolution. AI, including new generative AI uses, increases the business value of your data by an order of magnitude. It enables more of your people, from business executives, managers and workers on the front lines, to use more data and data analytics responsibly in more ways than ever before. AI puts data’s value to the enterprise on steroids. On this point, business executives agree. According to an Avanade survey of 3,000 business and IT executives around the world, nearly all (92%) agreed that organizations need to shift to an AI-first operating model in the next 12 months to remain competitive. And almost everyone (95%) shares our optimism in an AI-first future. But that sound you hear is the other shoe dropping. 

Just about as many (94%) say they need to increase their data platform investments to make those aspirations a reality—and scale them across their enterprises. Executives say they need to do more, but they’re not sure what “more” looks like. Accenture and Avanade believe organizations need to make generative AI and copilot assistance an intuitive part of their business users’ current tools, rather than an additional, technical system on which they must train employees, and another bottleneck that employees must continually navigate from their existing work environment. Our research also found that 63% of executives don’t completely trust the data their company uses today. That’s especially concerning since data readiness—clean, accurate, reliable and discoverable data—is essential to turn rapidly evolving AI into a powerful business asset. Without robust data governance creating data that can be fully trusted, accessed and harnessed in real-time across an organization, generative AI is just another shiny object in the technology firmament.