I’d built and defended executive dashboards for years before that meeting, and dashboards had trained me to believe imperfect data was a manageable, even routine problem. Machine learning assumes the historical data it’s trained on represents reality as it actually is. 5 questions I ask before any AI platform conversationToday, I rarely begin AI discussions by talking about technology. Can we explain, in plain language, where this data actually comes from? And underneath all of it, are we actually solving a business problem, or are we chasing a technology because it’s the thing everyone else is talking about this quarter?