Key Takeaways
- Highlights BARC and Actian research on data product maturity and AI success.
- Shows why trusted data products are critical for scaling AI.
- Emphasizes governance as a foundation for production-ready AI.
- Connects mature data practices with moving AI beyond pilot stages.
Chapters
Every year, companies pour billions into AI. The pilots look promising. The demos impress the board.
And yet, most AI projects never make it to production. So what separates the organizations that scale AI from the ones that stall?
Actian partnered with BARC, global leading data analytics research firm, to survey more than 300 enterprise data leaders across industries and regions to find out. The answer was striking. 85% of organizations that have deployed data products company-wide have three or more AI projects running in production right now.
Compare that to organizations without mature data products, only 25% have reached the same milestone. That's a 3.4 times difference, not from a better model, not from more compute, from the data foundation underneath it. Why does this connection exist?
AI systems depend on data that is trusted, governed, and consistently defined. Data products deliver exactly that: clear ownership, documented schemas, built-in quality controls, and data assets that are reusable across the organization.
Without that foundation, models may work in the lab but fail in the real world. The 2026 BARC/Actian Global Research Report goes deeper, examining how organizations across industries are building the data foundations that make AI succeed. Download the full report at actian.com/research.
