What is the top operational challenge in enterprise AI?

Anahita Tafvizi

Chief Data & AI Officer · Snowflake

Data Governance

Anahita Tafvizi says the real challenge is building the data foundation with unified governance and definitions, because without it AI will just scale your chaos across the company.

Paul McDonagh-Smith

Visiting Senior Lecturer (IT Group and Executive Education) · Mit Sloan School Of Management

Cultural Inertia

Paul McDonagh-Smith says the operational challenge is cultural inertia, which he ties to large groups of people and processes continuing as they always have until something bad happens.

The answer starts at 1:00.

CP

Conny Ploth

AI Transformation Vice President, Global Data & AI · Santander

Fix the Process First

Conny Ploth says that rather than putting an AI layer on top of a messy process, companies really need to fix the process first, because otherwise AI just speeds up the inefficiencies without resolving them at their root cause.

The answer starts at 4:45.

Amol Mathur

Co-Founder & CPO · Dash Security

Governance Challenge

Amol Mathur says the challenge is governance, because with fragmented AI tools you don't know how data crosses trust boundaries or what risks agentic technologies bring.

Scot Burdette

Global Division CIO, Measurement and Analytics · Abb

People Adoption

Scot Burdette says the biggest thing is people adoption, because transformation is more about people than technology and people determine how change succeeds.

Sam Pierson

Chief Technology Officer · Qlik

Reliable, High‑Quality Data

Sam Pierson says the number one operational challenge is having a data foundation that is quantifiably reliable and high quality.

Muralidhar Vemulapalli

Chief Enterprise Architect/ Acting CTO · Arkansas Blue Cross And Blue Shield

Explainability and Auditability

Muralidhar Vemulapalli says the most important thing is explainability and auditability, requiring transparency, traceable outputs with complete lineage and supporting reasoning, because large LLMs' decision models are not always clear.