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New TDWI Research Reveals the Data Strategies Behind High-Impact AI

Report establishes guidelines for a data foundation that will enable organizations to standardize and operationalize data for AI.

  • June 15, 2026

SEATTLE, WA—TDWI Research has released a new original research report. Based on survey data and focus group data, the TDWI Blueprint Report: Building an AI-Ready Data Foundation explains a capability stack that will allow organizations to support successful AI.

Written by the VP of TDWI research, Fern Halper, Ph.D., the report helps organizations understand the demands AI is placing on their data environments and how they can improve their architecture to support multicloud deployments, reusable semantic context, and controlled AI access to enterprise systems.

In the report, Halper says, “Although many organizations have achieved localized successes, the findings in this Blueprint suggest that long-term AI success depends on the strength of the underlying data foundation.” She explains how fragmented data environments, inconsistent governance, weak semantic alignment, and poor data accessibility become major constraints as AI initiatives move from experimentation into production.

Report Highlights

Among this report’s key findings:

  • Generative and agentic AI are driving a major shift in enterprise data environments. Unstructured data, including documents, emails, chat transcripts, and multimedia content, is becoming central to AI initiatives.
  • Organizations achieving the greatest business impact from AI are significantly more likely to implement unified data platforms, open table formats, vector data stores, and governance embedded directly into the data layer.
  • More than half of organizations (58%) seeing the most impact from AI believe a strong data foundation is essential for successful AI, and another 37% believe it is important.
  • High-impact organizations are significantly more likely to adopt domain-level semantic models (60% vs. 17%) and enterprise taxonomies, or business glossaries (36% vs. 7%), underscoring the importance of shared meaning in scaling AI.
  • High-impact organizations also increasingly view the data foundation not simply as infrastructure, but as a strategic differentiator that enables scalable, production-grade AI.

The complete report examines how successful organizations are building trusted, governed, and well-architected data environments to support AI. It explores enabling technologies for data such as modern platforms, scalable compute, data governance tools, metadata and semantic layer management, open table formats, and emerging standards.

This research was sponsored by Alteryx, Snowflake, and ZoomInfo.

Download the report

Watch the webinar

 

About the Author
FERN HALPER, Ph.D., is vice president of TDWI research. Her work focuses on AI, generative AI, agentic AI, AI governance, cloud computing, and other modern analytics approaches. She has more than 25 years of experience in data and business analysis and AI and has published numerous articles on data mining and information technology. Halper is co-author of “Dummies” books on cloud computing, hybrid cloud, and service management, as well as Big Data for Dummies. Halper is also the author of the 2026 book, Data Makes the World Go ’Round: The data, tech, and trust behind AI success. She has been a partner at industry analyst firm Hurwitz & Associates and a lead analyst for Bell Labs. She has taught at both Colgate University and Bentley University. Her Ph.D. is from Texas A&M University. You can reach her at [email protected] and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/fbhalper/.

About TDWI
For 30 years, TDWI has provided individuals and teams with a comprehensive portfolio of business and technical education and research about all things data. TDWI’s in-depth, best-practices-based knowledge can be quickly applied to develop world-class talent across your organization’s business and IT functions to enhance analytical, data-driven decision making. TDWI offers major conferences as well as topical seminars, onsite education, membership, certification, live webinars, resource-filled publications, industry news, and in-depth research. See tdwi.org or follow us on LinkedIn at tdwi.org/linkedin.

About 1105 Media
1105 Media, Inc., is a leading provider of integrated information and media in targeted business-to-business markets, including specialized sectors of the information technology community; industrial health, safety, and compliance; security; environmental protection; and home healthcare. 1105's offerings span print and online magazines, journals, and newsletters; seminars, conferences, and trade shows; training courseware; and web-based services. 1105 Media is based in Woodland Hills, California, with offices throughout the U.S. 


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