Scaling AI Shouldn’t Mean Rebuilding Data Foundations Every Time

The 2027 planning season is right around the corner for enterprises, and AI investments are once again at the top of C-suite conversations. Akeneo’s recent survey of IT decision-makers showed 93% reported productivity gains from AI, yet 43% said AI has also added new responsibilities to their roles. These findings highlight the significant amount of groundwork required to bring AI projects to life.

Data preparation, in particular, represents a substantial part of that work. Among IT leaders Akeneo surveyed, 36% said their organizations spend more than half of the total effort on an AI project preparing data. Another 53% reported spending between 26% and 50% of their AI project effort on data preparation. While this preparation is necessary, the opportunity lies in ensuring that the work completed for one AI deployment can be reused to support the next.

AI may eliminate work in one part of the business, while creating a different set of tasks for IT teams as they prepare data and rebuild context for each new deployment. The opportunity now is to make more of that work reusable,…