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DGIQ-EDW26: The Hidden Cost of Bad Data: How Digital Debt Undermines AI Outcomes

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As organizations race to adopt AI and machine learning, many overlook the silent threat that poses the greatest risk to model accuracy, trustworthiness, and long-term performance: digital debt. Decades of unstructured content, inconsistent metadata, duplicate records, legacy repositories, ungoverned file shares, and unclear lineage accumulate into a hidden liability that directly shapes the behavior and failures of modern AI systems.
 
This session explores the compounding effect digital debt has on AI outcomes, from skewed training sets and hallucinations to model drift, bias amplification, and unreliable decision-making. Drawing on real-world enterprise experiences and frameworks, we’ll unpack how poor data hygiene degrades model quality over time and why traditional governance practices are no longer sufficient in an AI-driven world.
 
Participants will learn how to identify, measure, and remediate digital debt before it undermines AI initiatives; how to modernize governance practices for ML ecosystems; and how to establish scalable controls that ensure accuracy, lineage, and trust. We will walk through practical techniques for cleansing, restructuring, classifying, and labeling data to make it AI-ready, and highlight governance patterns that help organizations prevent future debt from accumulating.

You will leave with a roadmap for building AI that delivers reliable outcomes, reduced risk, and a more defensible, future-proof data governance posture, turning digital debt from a liability into a competitive advantage.
 
Speaker: Eric Riz, President, eMark Consulting

Eric is a visionary technology entrepreneur with over two decades of industry experience. In 2004, he founded eMark Consulting, a leader in providing Microsoft-based solutions globally. A decade later, he launched VERIFIED™, a data analytics firm acclaimed for its innovative approach to verifying resumes and social profiles.

As a sought-after public speaker, Eric delivers engaging talks on technology, AI, and entrepreneurship, captivating audiences at major tech events worldwide. His insights have been featured in prominent publications, including The Globe and Mail, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fox Business, and The Huffington Post.

Eric's expertise in enterprise strategy, data management, and technology governance has led to impactful work with global giants such as Disney, UPS and Kellogg’s. He serves on the Microsoft AI Advisory Board and has been recognized with six Microsoft MVP awards, underscoring his commitment to innovation and excellence.

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