More than three-quarters of business leaders say they’re under growing pressure to drive business value with data, according to a Salesforce report, but many leaders say their data is often outdated, incomplete or low quality.
Salesforce’s “State of Data and Analytics” report (registration required) found that while business leaders are eager to use AI for surfacing insights and augmenting employee efforts, technical leaders say new data and analytics strategies are needed.
This isn’t a new problem. Issues with data quality, silos and incompleteness have plagued businesses for years. But urgency is growing as organizations look to deploy autonomous AI agents, which rely on data and operate with less human oversight than earlier tools.
According to the Salesforce report, 84% of data and analytics leaders believe their data strategies require a complete overhaul before their AI ambitions can succeed.
Other findings include:
- 63% of business leaders describe their organizations as data-driven, up 10 points from 2023.
- 63% of data and analytics leaders say their companies struggle to use data to drive business priorities, highlighting a gap between perceived and actual data maturity.
- 49% of business leaders say they can reliably generate timely insights.
- 49% of data and analytics leaders say their companies occasionally or frequently draw incorrect conclusions from data lacking business context.
Data issues hurting AI deployment plans
The report also found that while 67% of data and analytics leaders feel pressure to implement AI quickly, 42% lack full confidence in the accuracy and relevance of AI outputs.
The risks of feeding poor data to AI are significant. The report found that 89% of data and analytics leaders with AI in production have experienced inaccurate or misleading outputs. Among those training or fine-tuning their own models, 55% report wasting significant resources due to bad data.
Data quality’s impact on AI adoption — particularly agentic AI — is a growing concern for Salesforce as it expands its Agentforce platform. But Salesforce isn’t the only one sounding the alarm.
KPMG’s AI Quarterly Pulse Survey for Q2 2025, published in July, found concern over data quality rose sharply, from 56% in Q1 to 82% in Q2.
Cloudera’s April 2025 report, “The Future of Enterprise AI Agents,” which surveyed nearly 1,500 IT leaders across 14 countries, found that 96% plan to expand use of AI agents over the next year. Data management and governance remained key concerns for that gruop, with 53% of leaders citing data privacy and 40% citing integration with legacy systems as barriers.
The post Poor data quality hampering businesses and their AI plans appeared first on MarTech.
