Your AI strategy may have a data problem (and here's what it could be costing your business)

Businesses wanting to expand their AI capabilities often focus on investing in GPU resources. But in many cases, it’s not hardware that’s holding them back, but the quality and availability of their data. To work effectively, AI systems need relevant data that’s consistently accessible, correctly identified, and properly governed; without that, your hardware investment could be wasted.

The Dell AI Data Platform helps businesses catalog and manage the data they already own, turning siloed, scattered data into a single enterprise-wide context layer that AI systems can trust and act on, so that AI can extract maximum benefit from it, with no need to overhaul existing data structures.

TL;DR

• AI success depends on data readiness just as much as GPU power, but most enterprise data is unstructured and needs cataloging before it can be used effectively
• The Dell AI Data Platform helps businesses prepare and manage the data they already own, without needing to overhaul existing data structures
• The Dell AI Data Platform combines storage engines (PowerScale, ObjectScale, Lightning File System), Data Engines that process, analyze and search enterprise data, and an Orchestration Engine that automates data pipelines end-to-end

Data readiness (not more GPUs) is the key to AI success

The success or failure of AI projects depends on data just as much as computing power. The challenge is providing it in the right form, as the majority of enterprise data remains unstructured and needs to be cataloged, organized, and made available before it can be used effectively by AI.

This isn’t something that can be skipped over. Indeed, according to a Gartner® study*: “Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data.”

The Dell AI Data Platform is designed to help businesses prepare their data for ingestion and processing, no matter where it’s located in the existing environment, so they can get the most out of their AI investment.

Dealing with fragmented data has a real cost

Corporate data is often spread across different locations, systems, and applications, and cataloging and preparing it by hand takes AI teams away from building models and workflows. The result is wasted resources, delayed deployment, and hardware that may sit underused in the meantime, eating into your ROI on AI projects. Without an enterprise-wide context layer connecting these locations, teams end up rebuilding the same context repeatedly instead of reusing it.

The Dell AI Data Platform is built to streamline data preparation tasks with dedicated storage engines:

• PowerScale (file)
• ObjectScale (object)
• Lightning File System (high-performance parallel access)

Information can be managed in place while remaining accessible at the speeds demanded by AI workloads, letting businesses build on their AI platform and develop new initiatives without having to re-engineer data sources.

Governance needs to be built in from the outset

Data shared with AI systems may contain information that’s sensitive or subject to regulatory requirements, meaning management and governance are non-negotiable. A recent survey found that almost 87% of businesses had delayed AI deployments because their data security and governance weren’t ready.

With the Dell AI Data Platform, governance is built directly into the data layer. Extensive access controls and security measures are included, such as data masking, data encryption, and real-time threat detection. This helps to protect data against both unauthorized internal access and external intrusions.

Data visibility helps businesses make the right infrastructure investment

When information is scattered across edge, core, and cloud locations, it’s hard to estimate requirements—and easy to waste money on hardware resources that won’t be fully utilized or effective. Having a clear view of data volumes and locations allows businesses to scale their storage, compute, and network resources appropriately.

The Dell AI Data Platform enables federated access to information across a wide range of systems and formats, helping businesses audit their data, identify possible new sources of insight, and make better-informed capacity decisions.

How does the Dell AI Data Platform integrate orchestration with storage and security?

The Dell AI Data Platform includes a Data Orchestration Engine, which connects and manages data pipelines across the AI lifecycle. This is valuable for AI-supported systems such as customer support engines that draw on information from manuals, ticket histories, and CRM records.

With the Dell data search and analytics capabilities working together, the context of a support call can be automatically assembled and provided to a human agent, saving them from having to search multiple systems by hand.

How do the Dell Data Engines work?

The Dell Data Engines include processing, analytics, and search capabilities. Together, they can transform information scattered across a distributed multi-vendor data environment into a working AI pipeline with consistent management and baked-in security and governance. The Data Engine works alongside the platform’s Storage Engines and Orchestration Engine to move data from raw and scattered to AI-ready.

How does the Dell AI Data Platform fit into an existing data environment?

The Dell AI Data Platform is built for federated access to existing systems, so there’s no need to move or consolidate AI data before it can be queried. Open standards including Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Parquet support broad compatibility and reduce reliance on proprietary systems.

And there’s no requirement to deploy all data engine capabilities at once. Businesses can, for example, start by using the analytics to enable queries across data lakes and object stores, then build in other capabilities at a later date. This provides a route to developing more powerful and versatile AI workflows that don’t rely on compute power alone.

Whatever stage of AI development you’re at, the Dell AI Data Platform can reduce the administrative burden while ensuring AI systems make effective use of the available data. It’s not just a question of convenience: for the best chance of success, and the best return on your GPU investment, your data infrastructure matters just as much as the hardware layer.

If you think the Dell AI Data Platform could benefit your business, find out more on the Dell website: US readers click here.

FAQs

Does more GPU power guarantee AI success?

Not on its own. Data quality and availability play just as big a role in AI success, and unstructured or poorly governed data can undermine even the most powerful hardware setup.

Does adopting the Dell AI Data Platform mean overhauling existing data systems?

No. The Dell AI Data Platform is built for federated access to existing systems using open standards like Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Parquet, so data can be queried in place without being moved or consolidated first.

Do businesses need to deploy all capabilities at once?

No. The Dell AI Data Platform has an open, modular format that enables businesses to deploy the engines and capabilities they need.