In 2023, Donald Farmer delivered a keynote titled “Making Sense of Semantics” during the BARC Retreat. It was a period in which AI was transitioning from experimentation and hype toward early forms of large-scale adoption, accompanied by growing concerns around scalability, governance, and real business value. At the same time, Farmer’s presentation exposed a fundamental issue: despite significant technological advances,…
A recent Economist article (July 2025) describes how China is building a “national data ocean,” merging consumer behavior, industrial processes, and state activity into a unified system. This vast concentration of data fuels China’s AI strategy. The country is conducting an unprecedented experiment in which data is not merely a resource, but instead becomes a strategic weapon…
Introduction The promises surrounding artificial intelligence are immense, but the reality is often disappointing. Various studies show that most AI projects never progress beyond the pilot phase or are even abandoned altogether before completion. What began as a wave of enthusiasm, for many organizations ends in costs, frustration, and missed opportunities. Recent research by McKinsey,…
In our previous blogs, we outlined several efforts aimed at making data storage more sustainable. However, some critics remain unconvinced, often dismissing these efforts as little more than marketing rhetoric. They argue that green claims must be substantiated with hard data. Let’s take a closer look at some of the critical perspectives on the green…
Over the past two blogs, we explored how essential data storage is to building trustworthy AI, and how this rapidly growing storage demand is driving a mounting ecological footprint. While the first blog highlighted data as the oxygen of AI, the second exposed that this oxygen comes at a high cost: electricity consumption, water use, and CO₂…
In my previous blog, I highlighted how essential sufficient data storage is to deploy AI in a reliable and scalable manner. In this follow-up, we take a closer look at the darker side of our insatiable storage appetite: its environmental impact. Recent estimates suggest that by 2025, the global data volume will exceed 200 zettabytes….
This is the first part of a four-part blog series on the challenges of data storage in a world of ever-growing demand. A recent article by Vincent Oostakker in Data News (28 July 2025) caught my attention: “Without sufficient data storage, we can no longer trust AI.” In short, his article highlights a pressing issue: global data storage…
Scaling GenAI with Federated, Domain-Driven Data Governance The previous blog posts explained how Data Quality plays a very important role, if not the most important one, in maximizing the value of GenAI. Several GenAI pilots are underway, and the million dollar question is: how do we make the leap to large-scale production use? To achieve…
From Strategy to Execution: Making Data Governance Actionable The BARC BI & Analytics Trend Monitor 2024 confirms a clear direction: organizations are no longer debating the importance of data quality — they’re now grappling with execution. While GenAI garners headlines, the real groundwork lies in operationalizing robust data governance and elevating data literacy across teams….
According to BARC’s 2024 survey, “Data Foundations” has emerged as one of the top priority for data and analytics leaders. This continues a long-standing focus on data quality which has remained a top concern for over a decade. The continued rise of data governance reflects both the growing maturity and complexity of data environments, and…
