Virtually every organization is actively pursuing the goal of becoming more data-centric, enabling them to swiftly uncover and respond to valuable insights. With generative AI, the power and potential of organizational data is bigger than ever before. In response, organizations often appoint chief data officers (CDOs) to lead them toward data-driven success.
In the summer of 2023, Thomas H. Davenport, Randy Bean, and Richard Wang conducted a global study to understand how this role is evolving, what the key priorities and roadblocks are for CDOs, and how they tackle generative AI. Their findings are presented in an AWS-sponsored report, CDO Agenda 2024: Navigating Data and Generative AI Frontiers. One of the largest CDO studies in the market, it includes findings from a survey of 334 respondents with CDO or equivalent titles and level positions as well as qualitative interviews with 12 leading CDOs.
Below are a few of their key learnings as they appear in the report.
Creating visible value is still a key focus for many CDOs: 44 percent of CDOs still define success as achieving business objectives, as opposed to technical accomplishments (only 3 percent), and mark analytics and AI as keys to providing value. Other approaches include literacy training, councils across the organization, approaching data management use case by use case, and the data product management approach.
CDOs are enthusiastic about the potential of generative AI: Generative AI dominated the discussion. The majority of CDOs (80 percent) agreed that it would eventually transform their organization’s business environment, but they don’t want to abandon existing data-related initiatives in favor of generative AI yet.
The biggest roadblocks to generative AI—data quality and finding the right use cases: A large portion of CDOs (46 percent) rank data quality and finding the right use cases as the two biggest challenges for realizing the potential of generative AI, followed by (creating) guardrails around responsible AI, security, and privacy of data. Customer operation, such as customer support and chatbots, was the top generative AI use case (44 percent), followed by overall personal productivity (40 percent), and software code generation (36 percent).
Data strategy is crucial to generative AI success: More than half (57 percent) had not yet made necessary changes to their company’s data strategies to support generative AI, but a majority (93 percent) of CDOs agreed that data strategy is crucial for getting value out of generative AI. A quarter of CDOs are pursuing data integration and cleaning, while nearly one-fifth are surveying data to understand what might support generative AI use cases.
Culture comes first, but challenges persist: Culture is increasingly critical to effective data use, but CDOs are taking a “slow and steady” approach to changing it. Culture initiatives are a major focus for over half of the CDOs surveyed, including data literacy programs and change management.
CDOs embrace new data governance strategies: Similar to last year, CDOs spend a substantial part of their time focusing on data governance activities (63 percent in 2023 vs. 44 percent in 2022). The new methods of establishing governance include an “enablement” focus—making it easier to do the right thing with data—and common data platforms.
Data-driven transformation is a team sport: Successful CDOs see their role as making their internal clients more successful in achieving their objectives. They don’t focus so much on their own performance alone but on building coalitions to help their organizations succeed.
You can read the comprehensive report here.
You may also be interested in MIT Sloan Executive Education’s on-demand Generative AI Business Sprint and the week-long, in-person course Leading the AI-Driven Organization.