AI initiatives don’t fail because of bad models. They fail because objectives, data, and business processes aren’t clearly understood first. In this thought-leadership piece, Sesame Software CEO Rick Banister explains why AI should be treated as a tool, not a goal, and how examining data quality and workflows during the discovery phase often delivers more value than deploying AI itself.

If your team is exploring how to bring AI into your enterprise workflows, you’ve probably hit a familiar challenge: the data isn’t ready. It’s trapped in siloed systems, inconsistent across platforms, or missing altogether. And while plenty of vendors will offer to “start fresh,” building a new data foundation from scratch is time-consuming, expensive, and often unnecessary. Here’s the good news: you may already have what you need if you can access, move, and prepare your dat