Events

Enterprises more than doubled AI infrastructure spending in 2025 to $318 billion, yet most AI initiatives still fail to deliver, and the cause is rarely the model. Chad Timms, President of Fortified Data, examines the Data Preparation Gap: the distance between the data organizations have and the data their AI systems require. Gartner predicts 60 percent of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data will be abandoned, and only 12 percent of organizations report data of sufficient quality to support AI at all. Drawing on real client outcomes, this session dismantles two expensive myths, that data must be perfect before AI can begin and that AI will fix bad data on its own, and closes with the readiness questions every technology leader should be able to answer before funding the next initiative.