Gen AI can be the answer to your data problems — but not all of them

“It’s not a silver bullet,” says Daniel Avancini, chief data officer at Indicium, an AI and data consultancy.

If a company is just starting on its data journey, getting the basics right is key, including building good data platforms, setting up data governance processes, and using efficient and robust traditional approaches to identifying, classifying, and cleaning data.

“Gen AI is definitely something that’s going to help, but there are a lot of traditional best practices that need to be implemented first,” he says.

Without those foundations in place, an LLM may have some limited benefits. But when companies do have their frameworks in place, and are dealing with very large amounts of data, then there are specific tasks that gen AI can help with.

“But I wouldn’t say that, with the technology we have now, it would be a replacement for traditional approaches,” he says.