Episode Details

Why the Same Data Problems That Existed Before AI Still Exist - They Just Get Expressed Faster, With More Confidence

Guest: Zoher Karu, Founder and President at ZiZi Advisors

Host: Seth Earley, CEO at Earley Information Science

Published on: September 14, 2026

In this episode, Seth Earley speaks with Zoher Karu, Founder and President of ZiZi Advisors, who has spent his career building enterprise data and analytics programs at Sears Holdings, eBay, Citibank, and Blue Shield of California - and building personalization systems before personalization was something a large language model could attempt. They explore why data governance has become the most important discipline in the AI era, why giving an LLM clean data is still not enough if it does not understand your business, why the differentiating factor between organizations will not be the model but the context, and what executives most consistently get wrong when they point powerful new tools at the same old data problems.

Key Takeaways:

• Data governance has become sexy again not because AI demands new governance, but because the cost of skipping the old kind now shows up faster, with more confidence behind the wrong answer.
• Pointing a more powerful AI engine at ungoverned data does not produce better answers - it produces bad decisions faster, with AI's characteristic knack for sounding right even when it is wrong.
• Multiple definitions of the same metric across the same organization - different versions of active customer, different versions of sales - are not AI problems, they are governance problems that AI amplifies.
• Cleaning data is necessary but not sufficient - the model also needs to understand the context of your business, the rules, the exceptions, and the institutional knowledge that lives in people's heads.
• The AI models themselves are moving toward commoditization; the differentiating factor will be how well organizations have captured and made available their own business context and knowledge.
• Start with productivity improvements to demonstrate early value, but the real value of AI is business process change - asking not just how to automate the notes after a phone call, but why you are taking phone calls at all.
• Governance is not internal bureaucracy - it is the brakes in the car. The reason you can go fast around a curve is that you know you have brakes. Controls let you operate at the limit rather than inching along out of fear.

Insightful Quotes:

"Just because you point powerful AI tools at your data doesn't mean it can figure out exactly what's what. There might be four columns called sales. How does it know which one you actually meant? And the classic problems - data silos, multiple sources of truth, ambiguity about how things connect together - they always existed, and they still exist." - Zoher Karu

"You can give an LLM all the data you want, and it can be pristine, but if you don't tell it the context around the way to use that data, that's going to be the next wave of problems to solve. The way you run your business is also your asset - and that is typically captured loosely in documents, Slack messages, emails, or not captured anywhere at all." - Zoher Karu

"The organizations that treat AI like magic are the ones that are getting burned. The same old problems - the data silos, the multiple sources of truth, the missing business context - do not disappear. They just get expressed faster, with more confidence." - Seth Earley

Tune in to discover why the discipline that seemed least exciting in the AI era turns out to be the most consequential - and what it takes to build an AI foundation that actually reflects how your organization runs.

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/i