That's the Ticket: Shifting How We Talk to Help AI-Assistants (and People!) Succeed

FM (Friday Morning) Reflection #15

Don’t roll your eyes, long-time data professionals! Yes, “garbage in, garbage out” might feel like the ultimate cliché, right up there with “it is what it is,” “we're not reinventing the wheel here,” or “think outside the box.” But as worn out as it sounds, it survives because it acknowledges a common point of frustration: bad data put into a system results in poor quality outputs and user experiences.

To avoid or ameliorate the effects of bad data, organizations invest in data warehouses, catalogs, and governance efforts to generate insights and value from their data assets—efforts largely focused on structured data. I know this firsthand from years in technology consulting.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in unstructured data and semi-structured data. This deep pool of information hides in plain sight in the form of chat logs, call transcripts, emails, IoT logs, spreadsheets, social media posts, and other artifacts from our daily interactions.

Classical techniques to…