The Data Strategy series
Data management has a predictable failure mode: lack of urgency at strategy level, lack of clarity in execution, lack of mandate with the fixers. AI is about to make that dysfunction impossible to survive. The answer is not more governance. It is fewer people in the loop.
In nearly twenty years working with data, I have yet to meet a business stakeholder who woke up wanting a data product. The shift we need is from describing what data is to articulating what data does. "Data-as-a-product" was the right vocabulary for the wrong conversation.
AI is removing the technical barriers that shaped data strategy. When every team can build, the bottleneck shifts from capability to direction. The data leader's most important job isn't enabling more use cases. It's translating business strategy into clear data priorities and saying no to the rest.