AI Starts with Data: A Practical Blueprint for Trusted, Governed, Enterprise AI, by Jeffrey Harris
Transform enterprise data into trusted, governed, AI-ready assets that power trusted copilots, assistants, agents, and business decisions.
Chapter 1: AI Does Not Fail Because of Models
Chapter 2: Why Traditional Data Readiness Is No Longer Enough
Chapter 3: What AI-Ready Data Actually Means
Chapter 4: Traditional Data Structures: What They Were Built For
Chapter 5: Structured Data in the Age of AI
Chapter 6: Semi-Structured Data as the Missing Middle
Chapter 7: Unstructured Data as a First-Class Enterprise Asset
Chapter 8: Why Document Repositories Alone Are Not Enough
Chapter 9: Metadata Is the Control Plane for AI
Chapter 10: Business Meaning: Glossaries, Taxonomies, and Ontologies
Chapter 11: Knowledge Graphs, Entity Resolution, and Relationship Intelligence
Chapter 12: Provenance, Lineage, and Explainability from the Data Side
Chapter 13: The AI-Ready Data Capability Pillars
Chapter 14: Converged Data Patterns: Relational, Vector, Graph, and Content
Chapter 15: Integration Patterns for AI-Ready Data
Chapter 16: Retrieval and Grounding as Architecture Concerns
Chapter 17: Serving Data to Copilots, Assistants, and Agents
Chapter 18: Security, Identity, and Access-Aware Data Delivery
Chapter 19: Why Governance for AI Is Different from Governance for Analytics
Chapter 20: Governing Structured and Unstructured Data Together
Chapter 21: Responsible AI Starts Upstream in the Data Estate
Chapter 22: The Policy Layer: Retention, Legal Hold, Privacy, and Records
Chapter 23: Who Owns AI-Ready Data?
Chapter 24: AI-Ready Data Products
Chapter 25: Federated Delivery: Platform Teams, Domain Teams, and Centers of Excellence
Chapter 26: Adoption, Literacy, and Organizational Change
Chapter 27: Current-State Assessment
Chapter 28: Prioritizing Use Cases and Choosing the First Domains
Chapter 29: Designing the Target State
Chapter 30: Sequencing the Transformation
Chapter 31: Measuring AI-Readiness and Business Progress
Chapter 32: What Goes Wrong When You Layer AI on Top of Bad Data
Chapter 33: Anti-Patterns That Look Modern but Fail in Production
Chapter 34: From Dashboards to Agents
Chapter 35: The AI-Ready Enterprise
Analyze why so many enterprise AI initiatives fail despite powerful models and massive technology investments. Explore a reality that many organizations overlook: successful AI depends far more on data readiness, governance, metadata, and semantics than on model selection alone. Whether you are building generative AI applications, deploying enterprise assistants, creating intelligent agents, or modernizing your data architecture, apply a practical blueprint for turning fragmented information into trustworthy business intelligence.
Evaluate what it truly means to become AI-ready. Explore the critical role of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and discover how metadata, taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs, lineage, provenance, and retrieval architecture work together to create explainable and dependable AI systems. Through real-world examples, assessment frameworks, templates, and implementation guidance, you will uncover how data management must evolve to support modern AI workloads.
Design architectures that move beyond dashboards and analytics into the world of AI-powered copilots, assistants, and autonomous agents. Apply proven approaches for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI governance, content management, data products, security, access-aware delivery, semantic modeling, and enterprise knowledge systems. The book bridges the gap between traditional data management practices and the new requirements of enterprise AI, helping organizations reduce risk while increasing business value.
Assess your current state, prioritize high-impact use cases, define a target architecture, and sequence a realistic transformation roadmap. From measuring AI readiness and business progress to avoiding common implementation anti-patterns, you will gain practical techniques for creating scalable, trustworthy AI ecosystems that support innovation without sacrificing control. Architects, data leaders, governance professionals, AI practitioners, and executives will find actionable guidance they can immediately apply.
Build the foundation that separates successful enterprise AI programs from expensive experiments. See how trusted data, governed content, strong metadata, semantic consistency, and explainable retrieval create the conditions for AI systems that people can rely on, scale confidently, and use to drive lasting business outcomes.
Jeff Harris is a senior data architecture executive and thought leader with more than two decades of experience shaping enterprise data strategy for complex, global organizations. He has led transformational initiatives across data architecture, governance, modeling, integration, and analytics, enabling businesses to build the scalable, trusted, and modern data foundations required for growth, resilience, and AI readiness. His experience spans multiple industries, including healthcare, education, banking, logistics, and retail, with leadership impact across the United States and international markets. Jeff is also a respected speaker and technical author, having presented at more than 26 international conferences and authored Data Modeling Made Simple with erwin Data Modeler and Data Cataloging: Embracing AI and ML for Metadata.
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