Stop Cleaning Your Data. Start Finding The Signal.

InnovationAIStop Cleaning Your Data. Start Finding The Signal.ByJohn Sviokla,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. John Sviokla covers GenAI/AI's impact on commerce and society.Follow AuthorApr 22, 2026, 10:00am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Cleaning data can be a waste of time: Seek out signalgettyThe real AI advantage isn’t a pristine data lake — it’s knowing which information actually changes your decisions.The most expensive piece of advice in enterprise technology right now is five words long: get your data ready first.It is everywhere. The World Economic Forum reports that 72 percent of enterprises plan to prioritize data foundations and pipelines as their fastest-growing AI investment this year. Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60 percent of AI projects unsupported by "AI-ready" data. Cloudera’s latest global survey found that 96 percent of IT leaders report AI integration — but nearly 80 percent say their initiatives are constrained by limited data access, and only 18 percent describe their data as fully governed. A Fivetran benchmark of more than 500 senior data and technology leaders found that 73 percent of enterprise data initiatives fail to meet expectations — despite average annual data spending of $29.3 million per organization.The diagnosis is always the same: more governance, more cleaning, more pipeline engineering. Get the data house in order, then deploy AI.This sounds prudent. It is destroying value at scale.The logic has a seductive surface: bad data in, bad decisions out. Nobody disagrees. But the conclusion most enterprises are drawing — that data must be cleaned, standardized, and governed before AI can be useful — inverts the actual sequence of value creation. It assumes you know which data matters before you have asked which decisions matter. And it treats AI as...