Businesses rely on data, but it’s only of use if it can be accessed when and where it’s needed. A new report from The Modern Data Company suggests the challenge to be faced is not a lack of tools or ambition, but activation — ensuring data is discoverable, contextual, and trustworthy at the moment it’s needed for decisions and AI workflows.
The report finds that 84 percent of respondents say they encounter conflicting versions of the same metric, with more than a third experiencing this regularly. 68 percent say their data is not clean or reliable enough for AI use cases and 46 percent report they do not fully trust the data used for business decisions.
It also reveals that 89 percent rank finding the right data as among their top three most time-consuming tasks, while 62 percent say actual analysis takes the least amount of their time.
“Across the industry, it’s clear that many AI initiatives are struggling to move beyond experimentation,” says Saurabh Gupta, CEO of The Modern Data Company. “This research helps explain what’s holding them back. What we’re seeing isn’t a problem with AI algorithms, it’s a data activation problem, especially lack of context. Enterprises have invested heavily in data platforms and AI tools, but too often the data feeding those systems can’t be accessed, understood, or trusted when real decisions need to be made. AI doesn’t solve that gap, it exposes it. Closing the activation gap by ensuring data has full context is what turns pilots into production.”
Practitioners are clear about where progress should begin. 80 percent of respondents identify a unified semantic layer with standardized definitions as the single most important enabler of AI value, ranking it ahead of better AI models, additional tools, or more advanced features. Without a shared understanding of what business metrics mean, neither people nor AI systems can act on data consistently.
These foundations offer clear benefits. 87 percent of respondents say faster, more reliable access to high-quality data improves decision-making speed, 78 percent report increased confidence in decisions, and 66 percent point to improved business KPIs. Together, the findings position semantic alignment and core data foundations not as technical nice-to-haves, but as strategic drivers of business performance.
You can get The Modern Data Report 2026: The Data Activation Gap from The Modern Data Company site.
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